A primer of American literature

1633 A Primer

OF

American Literature

RICHARDSON

REVI^SED EDITION, WITH TWELVE
FORTRAITS.

Class

-^Sqa.

Book_

i-^s.^

A PRIMER

OF

American Literature.

BY

CHARLES F. RICHARDSON.

New and Revised Edition, with Twelve Portraits
OF American Authors.

SIXTEENTH THOUSAND.

BOSTON:

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,

11 East Seventeenth Street, New York.

^fje l^fbersitie Press, dambrtUfle*
1883.

ps^'

%

K6
SS3

Copyright, 1878 and 1883,
By CHARLES F. RICHARDSON. -»

All rights reserved.

RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:

ILECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY

H, O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
1620-1775.

PAGE

1. The Beginning 7

2. The Theological Era 9

3. Increase and Cotton Mather . , . .10

4. Eliot's Indian Bible 12

5. Roger Williams 13

6. Minor Writers of the Seventeenth Century 14

7. Yale College . . 15

8. Jonathan Edwards 16

9. The Followers of Edwards . . . . 17
ID, Benjamin Franklin 18

11. Franklin as a Writer ..... 20

12. Franklin as a Scientist and Diplomatist . .21

13. Minor Writers of the Eighteenth Century 21

CHAPTER II.

1775-1812.

1. The Revolutionary Period 23

2. George Washington as a Writer . . . 24

3. Thomas Jefferson 24

4. The Federalist 25

IV CONTENTS,

PAGE

5. Thomas Paine 26

6. Poets , . 27

7. The First Novelist 28

8. Historians and Other Writers . . . .28

CHAPTER III.
1812-1861.

1. Theological Changes 30

2. William Ellery Channing 32

3. Other Theological Writers . . . . 34

4. The Knickerbocker School 38

5. Washington Irving 38

6. James Kirke Paulding '.43

7. Joseph Rodman Drake 44

8. Fitz-Greene Halleck . . . .* . -45

9. Other Early Poets .46

10. William Cullen Bryant 48

11. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ... 50

12. Longfellow's Poems ....... 52

13. Longfellow's Prose Works .... 54

14. Longfellow's Dante 55

15. John Greenleaf Whittier 55

16. Holmes's Poems 58

17. Holmes's Prose Works 59

18. James Russell Lowell 60

19. Edgar Allan Poe 63

20. Other Poets 63

21. Orators 66

22. Historians ......... 66

23. Richard Hildreth 66

24. George Bancroft . . . . . . .67

25. John Gorham Palfrey 68

CONTENTS. V

PAGE

^d. William Hickling Prescott . . . . .68

27. John Lothrop Motley 69

28. Other Historians 70

29. Travellers 71

30. Fiction. — James Fenimore Cooper . . .71

31. Nathaniel Hawthorne 74

32. Other Novelists 77

33. Emerson and the Concord Authors . . 79

34. Miscellaneous Writers 82

35. Scientific and Special Writers . . . 84

CHAPTER IV.

after 1 86 1.

1. Literature of the Civil War . . . .86

2. Poets .88

3. Bayard Taylor 89

4. Richard Henry Stoddard 90

5. John Godfrey Sake 90

6. John Townsend Trowbridge .... 91

7. Walt Whitman 91

8. Joaquin Miller . . . . . . . 92

9. Francis Bret Harte 93

10. John Hay 93

11. Thomas Bailey Aldrich ...... 94

12. Edmund Clarence Stedman .... 95

13. The Piatts 96

14. Other Poets 97

15. William Dean Howells 98

16. Theodore Winthrop 100

17. Edward Eggleston ....... 100

18. Julian Hawthorne loi

19. Henry James, Jr loi

VI

CONTENTS.

20. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps .

21. Louisa May Alcott .

22. Harriet Prescott Spofford

23. Other Novelists

24. American Humor .

25. Charles Dudley Warner

26. James Parton ....

27. Edward E. Hale

28. Thomas Wentworth Higginson

29. Miscellaneous Writers .

PAGE

102
. 103

103
• 103

105
. 108

108
. 109

109
. IIO

PORTRAITS.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 51 ■-

John Greenleaf Whittier 56 n

Oliver Wendell Holmes . ... . . .58^

James Russell Lowell 6ov

James Fenimore Cooper 72 v

Nathaniel Hawthorne 74 v

Harriet Beecher Stowe 79 v

Ralph Waldo Emerson ...... 80 .

Thomas Bailey Aldrich 94 v

William Dean Howells 98 -

Henry James, Jr 102

Charles Dudley Warner ...... 108

A PRIMER

OF

AMERICAN LITERATURE.

CHAPTER I.

1620-1775.

I. The Beginning. — As soon as the English
colonists landed on American shores, at James-
town and Plymouth, they began to think of the
establishment of schools of sound learning : in Vir-
ginia for the purpose of educating the Indians, and
in Massachusetts Bay for the supply of church
pastors. By 16 19 the proposed Virginia university
possessed, as gifts from English donors, fifteen
thousand acres of land and fifteen hundred pounds
in money, and its early establishment at Henrico,
on the James River, was prevented only by a gen-
eral Indian massacre on March 22, 1622, when
three hundred and forty persons, including the su-
perintendent of the university, lost their lives.
Nothing further was done toward establishing a
Virginia college until 1660, and the College of

8 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

William and Mary, the outcome of the original
idea, did not receive its charter until 1693. The
Puritans of Massachusetts were more fortunate and
more prudent than the Cavaliers of Virginia, for
they suffered no loss by any extensive massacre,
and they depended upon themselves instead of
looking for help from England, where, indeed, they
had few friends. Their *' school or college " at
Newtown (Cambridge) was begun in 1636 with
only four hundred pounds in money, but two years
later it received a sum amounting, it is supposed,
to seven or eight hundred pounds, together with
a respectable library, by the will of John Harvard,
the young Charlestown minister whose name Har-
vard University now bears. From that time its
income was small but sure, and its existence during
the latter part of the seventeenth century did much
to give Massachusetts the literary start which the
greater wealth and the imported instructors of the
Virginia institution could not offset. In both colo-
nies, however, schools, and their inevitable result,
book-making, appeared with creditable promptness ;
and those colonists who first taught or wrote have
their posthumous reward in the most vigorous off-
shoot that the literature of any nation has ever
been able to put forth. American literature has a
right to a share in the heritage of the countrymen
of Caedmon and Chaucer and Shakespeare ; but
its enforced independence and its familiarity with

THE THEOLOGICAL ERA, 9

new surroundings have given it character and
deserts of its own.

2. The Theological Era. — At the outset Amer-
ican literature was imitative ; the first writers were
of English birth and education, and the early col-
leges were closely fashioned after the Oxford and
Cambridge pattern, in which divinity and the " hu-
manities " held the first place. The settlers of
Massachusetts were men who had fought and suf-
fered for their religious opinions, and they naturally
held them with considerable firmness, as opposed to
the Church of England on the one hand, and the
Baptists and Quakers on the other. So long as the
influence of the Puritans and their descendants was
predominant, it was natural that the affairs of the
soul should be uppermost; and not until politics
began to interest the colonists in a vital manner did
religious books and tracts cease to form the bulk of
the issues of the press. Novels and plays were
unknown ; poetry was didactic, devotional, or satiri-
cal ; histories were prejudiced by the theological
opinions of their writers; and philosophy became
an important study only as a means of religious
defence. One of the very first issues of the print-
ing-press set up at Cambridge in 1639 was the Bay
Psalm ^B 00k, a metrical version mainly written by
New England divines. This was the first book
written and printed at home, for though George
Sandys, an English gentleman connected with the

lO A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Virginia company, had made, on the banks of the
James River, a tolerable translation of Ovid, he
printed it in London.

3. Increase and Cotton Mather. — Nearly
every minister who had anything to say and the
means of getting it printed wrote a pamphlet or
two. The titles were often of great length. The
Application of Rede^nptioJi by the Effectual Work of
the Word and Spirit of Christ was as brief as the
average ; and the interest excited in such works is
shown by the fact that this treatise reached a sec-
ond edition after the death of the author, the Rev.
Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford. Of all
the theological writers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Increase Mather and his son
Cotton were the most voluminous. The publica-
tions of the former numbered eighty-five, and of the
latter no less than three hundred and eighty-two.
Increase Mather was born at Dorchester, and grad-
uated at Harvard in 1656, though he deemed an
additional European training necessary, and took a
degree at Dublin two years later. He was presi-
dent of Harvard between 1685 and 1701, and had
some success in his efforts to be preacher, diplomat,
and educator at the same time. His writings have
little literary value. Cotton Mather inherited all
his father's zeal, together with the bookish tastes of
his grandfather, John Cotton, of the First Church in
Boston. Cotton Mather graduated at Harvard in

INCREASE AND COTTON MATHER. II

1678, and, having overcome a painful habit of stam-
mering, became his father's colleague in the North
Church, Boston, in 1684. The youth was then only
twenty-one years of age, but his head had been
crammed with as much knowledge as John Milton's.
At twelve he was well along in Hebrew, and had
mastered the leading Latin and Greek authors ; and
his daily life was from the first a wonderful piece of
systematic machinery. Mather was a firm supporter
of the doctrines of extreme Calvinistic theology, and
to him devils and angels were as real as his own
family. In witchcraft he fully believed, in common
with most of the wise men of his time ; and his first
important book, Memorable Providences relating to
Witchcraft^ appeared in 1689, three years before the
Salem executions, which Mather justified. The
Wonders of the Invisible World, issued in 1693, gives
an account of these executions, without any attempt
at compassion,, or any intimation that human beings,
and not evil spirits, were being put to death. And
yet this cold, stern man was a life-long worker for
sailors, prisoners, Indians, and all the suffering and
oppressed. Mather wrote on a multitude of sub-
jects, but the work on which his reputation chiefly
rests is the Magnalia Christi Americana, published
in Condon in 1702, — a vast storehouse of ecclesi-
astical, civil, and educational history, together with
many biographical sketches. As a collection of
facts it is an authority; and in those passages

12 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

which are colored by the writer's prejudices it is
easy to detach the true from the false. Mather
died in 1728, and left a great gap in the literature
and theology of the time. . By his side the other
early clergymen of New England, with two excep-
tions, must take an inferior place, for they equalled
him in zeal and fertility, but not in ability.

4. Eliot's Indian Bible. — John Eliot, the
"Apostle to the Indians," was born in England
and educated at the University of Cambridge,
coming to Boston in 1631, and accepting as his
life-mission, the next year, the conversion of the
Indians, who were evidently, in his opinion, the^
descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. Having
learned the language by the aid of an Indian
servant in his family, he began preaching in No-
nan tum, now Newton, in 1646. Threats did ^ not
affect him, and little churches of natives were
slowly gathered in the Massachusetts Bay and
Plymouth colonies, twenty-four of his converts aid-
ing the industrious Eliot in carrying them on. He
had troubles with the colonists, whom he deterred
from extirpating the Indians in 1675, ^^^ whom
he offended by his Christian Commonwealth, pub-
lished in England in 1660, — a work against which
seditious intent was charged. Eliot wrote an Eng-
lish harmony of the Gospels, an Indian grammar,
and some lesser works ; but his chief monument
of industry and scholarship is his translation of the

ROGER WILLIAMS. 1 3

entire Bible into the Indian tongue. This appeared
in two parts, the New Testament in 1661, and the
whole Bible in 1663, and was the labor of the un-
aided Eliot. Its dialect is now unknown save to
an antiquary or two. This work is also noticeable
as the first Bible, in any language, printed in British
America, and still remains one of the most remark-
able contributions to philology made in this country,
though its value as a Christianizing agent was of
course temporary.

5. Roger Williams. — The Puritans, although
they were in a majority, and controlled religious
and social affairs in New England with an iron
hand, were not without opponents. Of these,
Roger Williams, a Church of England clergyman
who had become a non-conformist just before sail-
ing for America, in 1630, was the most prominent.
For five years he was in every way a political and
theological thorn in the side of the colony, though
many of his principles were thoroughly in accord
with wh^t is now considered truth and progress.
To escape banishment to England he went, with
four followers, to the site of the present city of
Providence, and set up a community in which secu-
lar and religious affairs were divorced. Becoming
a Baptist in 1639, he founded a church the same
year, which he quitted after a few months. The
remainder of his life was mainly spent in Provi-
dence, though he lived in London for some time^

14 d PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

where he was surprised to find John Milton as ver-
satile as himself, and considerably more profound.
The Quakers were freely admitted to Providence,
but Williams and George Fox carried on sharp con-
troversies, and the former willingly engaged in
public debate with the Quaker champion. His
Bloody Tenent of Persecution^ Hireling Ministry nofte
of Chris fs and Experiments of Spiritual ^Life and
Health are his principal works, but their present
value is not great. Williams's whole career shows
what a man of sincerity and force can accomplish,
though his powers be hindered by a certain insta-
bility and superficiality.

6. Minor Writers of the Seventeenth Cen-
tury.— Captain John Smith was a voluminous but
untrustworthy narrator of his own adventures.
Nathaniel Ward, minister at Ipswich, published in
1647 a sharp satire on English social life, called
The Simple Cobbler of Agawam. Governor John
Winthrop's valuable history of New England, in the
form of a journal between 16301 and 1649, was not
fully published until 1826. The manuscript of
another governor's journal, William Bradford's His-
tory of Ply7nouth Plantation (i 602-1 646), a still
abler work, was lost until 1855, and first completely
published in 1856. It had formed the basis of
Nathaniel Morton's New England^ s Memorial^ 1669.
The honor of the first publication of a volume of
poems in New England belongs to Anne Bradstreet,

VALE COLLEGE, 1 5

whose collected works appeared in 1678. Some of
the poems are by no means devoid of merit, though
disfigured by a paucity of words and a stiffness of
style. Peter Folger, Benjamin Franklin's ' grand-
father, also wrote a long doggerel entitled A Look-
ing Glass for the Times. It was hard to write any-
thing but doggerel so long as the current versions
of the Psalms were in vogue. Michael Wiggles-
worth's Day of Doom (1662) is a solemn poem on
the day of judgment, with some strong lines, one of
which devotes to non-elect infants "the easiest
room in hell." It was very popular in its day, run-
ning through nine editions in America and two in
England.

7. Yale College. — In the year 1700 some Con-
necticut ministers met at New Haven, and talked
over the plan of establishing a college in the
colony, a subject which had been broached as early
as 1647. Meeting again in Branford the same
year, they deposited forty books on a table, each
declaring as he laid down his parcel, " I give these
books for the founding a college in this colony.''
In its early years the new institution led a wander-
ing and not altogether peaceful life at Killingworth,
Saybrook, and Milford, but was finally located in
New Haven in 17 16. The Saybrook Platform
(Congregational) had been made binding on the
officers in 1708. The religious teaching of the
college was somewhat more conservative than that

1 6 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

at Harvard, even in the eighteenth century; but
the publications of its officers and graduates were
fewer, partly in consequence of the lack of a pub-
lishing centre in the colony. Philosophy, however,
was from the first a prominent study, and to this
fact is due, in some measure, the subsequent career
of the most eminent of American metaphysicians.
8. Jonathan Edwards was born in East Wind-
sor, Connecticut, in 1703, graduated at Yale in
1720, was a tutor there between 1724 and 1726,
was pastor in Northampton and Stockbridge, and
was elected president of the College of New Jersey
at Princeton, in 1757, dying there in March of
the next year, after holding office less than three
months. As a mere youth he began the study of
mental science, and took up the task of showing
the harmony between the Calvinistic theology and
the conclusions of philosophy. Locke he mastered
at thirteen, and afterwards studied all other acces-
sible authorities ; but Locke's influence was always,
strong in his mind. In 1746 he wrote a Treatise on
the Religious Affections^ in which he showed what
were the marks of true religion. An Inquiry into
the Qualifications for Full Communion followed ; a
work in which he laid down the principle, since
maintained in the New England Congregational
churches, that true conversion and a correct life
should be requisites for admission to the Lord's
Supper. This opinion was not shared by his

THE FOLLOWERS OF EDWARDS. I J

Northampton church, and he was compelled to
leave it and accept the duties of missionary to
the Stockbridge Indians. In Stockbridge, between
175 1 and 1754, he wrote his great treatise on the
freedom of the will, the full title of which was A
Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Notion
of that Freedo7n of Will which is supposed to be essen-
tial to Moral Agency^ Virtue and Vice, Reward and
Punishment, Praise and Blame. His other works
were not few, but upon this chiefly rests his repu-
tation as philosopher and theologian. It was
designed to show that Calvinistic notions of God's
moral government are not contrary to the common-
sense of mankind, but in strict consonance there-
with. Edwards maintained that the will is not
self-determined, and that the assertion of absence
of certainty in the universe is inconsistent with any
correct idea of a ruling power. Some English
necessitarians promptly hailed Edwards as one of
their number, but he repudiated the connection,
and declared that man's sinful disposition was
man's greatest sin, far from being an excuse for
wrong-doing. From its first appearance until the
present time the treatise has been the subject of
sharp criticism, both by Calvinists and Arminians,
but it has been supported by some of the ablest of
American divines.

9, The Followers of Edwards. — The principal
leaders, in the eighteenth century, of the school of

1 8 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

philosophy which Edwards shaped were Samuel
Hopkins, Nathaniel Emmons, and Timothy Dwight.
Hopkins studied theology under Edwards, of whom
he published a biography. His System of Theology
appeared in 1793, and " Hopkinsianism " was a
common term in New England for many years.
Hopkins was one of the first to oppose slavery;
he caused it to be abolished in Rhode Island, and
formed a plan for colonizing and evangelizing
Africa with free negroes. Emmons was pastor of
a church in Franklin, Massachusetts, from 1773 to
1840, and his writings were in substantial accord
with those of Dr. Hopkins. Timothy Dwight was
president of Yale between 1795 and 1817 His
Theology Explained and Defeiided (18 18) consisted
of one hundred and seventy-three sermons. While
adhering in the main to the principles of Edwards,
he dissented in minor points, and considerably
popularized the system. Dr. Dwight, who was one
of the most accomplished scholars of his time, also
wrote poetry and a book of travels, though his ex-
plorations extended no farther than New England
and New York.

10. Benjamin Franklin. — The eighteenth cen-
tury had now become rich in the names of- great
Americans, one of the most remarkable of whom
was Benjamin Franklin, who had all the versatility
of Roger Williams and Increase Mather, and was
a master in whatever branch of learning he touched.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 1 9

Franklin, the fifteenth of a family of seventeen
children, was bprn in Boston in 1706, his father
being a tallow-chandler and his mother the daugh-
ter of Peter Folger, a man of some literary ability.
Early apprenticed to his brother James as a printer,
Franklin read everything he could lay hands upon,
and was especially fond of Addison's Spectator^ then
a great favorite and a novelty. The itch for writing
was soon manifest, and he began to print pieces
on public affairs in The Nezv England Courant^
his brother*s newspaper. The people read and
liked them, but they caused a disagreement with
his brother, and in 1723 young Franklin ran away
to New York and Philadelphia, where he went to
work as a journeyman printer. In 1730 he bought
the Pennsylvania Gazette, then two years old, and
soon became a power in politics, literature, and
society. Through his efforts a library was started
in Philadelphia in 1731 ; the American Philosoph-
ical Society in 1743, and the Academy of Philadel-
phia, afterwards the University of Pennsylvania, in
1749. In 1753 he became postmaster-general for
the colonies, and was frequently commissioner be-
tween them and England. In 1766 he secured the
repeal of the obnoxious Stamp Act; in 1775 he
went to the Continental Congress; and in 1776 he
helped to draft the Declaration of Independence,
which he signed. Between that year and 1785 he
was employed abroad in various diplomatic func-

20 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

tions, returning in time to be a delegate to the Con-
stitutional Convention in 1787. He died at Phila-
delphia in 1790.

II. Franklin as a Writer. — A Dissertation on
Liberty a?id Necessity was printed by Franklin in
London in 1725, during a temporary residence in
that city, being a reply to a work by William
Wollaston on which the young printer was setting
type. In 1732 Franklin began, in Philadelphia,
the publication of Poor Richard's Almanac, the
issue of which was continued for twenty-five years.
" Richard Saunders, Philomath " was the professed
author, and Benjamin Franklin was the printer.
The principal part of the almanac was a collection
of saws and sayings, which were eagerly awaited
by the people, and promptly passed into current
circulation. The inculcation of practices of pru-
dence and economy was always a leading idea in
these maxims, and they had a prompt effect in
increasing the amount of spare money in Phila-
delphia. Besides these, the almanacs contained
jocose introductions and doggerel rhymes for each
month. The annual sale was about ten thousand
copies, but they were so worn out by their homely
readers that copies of the earlier issues are scarce.
The most of Franklin's other writings consisted of
miscellaneous and random, but by no means hasty,
papers on political, financial, social, and scientific
subjects, all of which have been preserved. The

MINOR WRITERS: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 21

Busybody^ a series of essays in Addisonian style,
and some ballads written in early life, should also
be mentioned. Franklin was an admirable letter-
writer, and in his correspondence a perfect picture
of the man is presented. If anything further were
needed to complete our idea of his personality, it is
supplied in his Autobiography.

12. Franklin as a Scientist and Diploma-
tist.— To Franklin belongs the honor of showing
that lightning is electricity, and the invention of
the lightning-rod. About the year 1750 he fore-
shadowed this discovery in his letters, and was
elected a fellow of the Royal Society in conse-
quence of his papers on the subject. In foreign
courts his influence was largely due to personal
power, but as a political writer he is clear and
cogent.

13. Minor Writers of the Eighteenth Cen-
tury.— An excellent History of the First Discovery
and Settlement of Virginia was published in 1747
by William Stith, afterwards president of William
and Mary College. David Brainerd, a missionary
to the Indians of New England and New York, kept
a diary, which was issued after his death, and is an
interesting history of the life of a sensitive, indus-
trious, and devout man. These memoirs were
edited by Jonathan Edwards. John Woolman, an
itinerant Quaker, born in New Jersey, wrote little,
his principal literary production being, like Brain-

'22 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN- LITER A TURE.

erd's, in the form of personal recollections. His
Journal of Life and Travels i7t the Service of the
Gospel appeared in 1774, three years after his
death. It is a charming book. Thomas Prince,
a minister of the Old South Church, Boston, from
1 7 18 to 1758, planned a Chronological History of
New Eiigland^ in the form of annals, from 1603 to
1730, but only brought the work down to 1633. It
was his intention to present a bare chronicle of
facts, but in passages he rose to a certain elo-
quence of historic portrayal. Chief Justice Samuel
Sewall, of Boston, was a prominent man in the
colony, and wrote several books ; his best literary
work, however, was his full Diary from 1674 to
1729, first published by the Massachusetts Histori-
cal Society in 1878-188 1. Sincere, graphic, devout,
and shrewd, these note-books of Judge Sewall's
present an important picture of Puritan life in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and are the
most remarkable contribution ever made by a diarist
to American social history.

CHAPTER II.

1775-1812.

I. The Revolutionary Period. — The American
Revolution was the cause of much commotion in
literature as well as in politics, being preceded,
attended, and followed by great activity of the pen.
A large part of the books and pamphlets written
at the time were necessarily of temporary interest
and of slight value as literature. But such of the
speeches, delivered during or before the meeting of
the Continental Congress, as have come down to
us are marked by the fire and intensity of an ear-
nest period. James Otis, of Boston, born in 1725,
was the author of some vigorous pamphlets, and
was a wonderful orator. A few fragments of his
speeches have been preserved, but the one which is
most familiar to school-boys is an avowed modern
imitation. Josiah Quincy, Jr. (i 744-1 775), shared
with Otis, in Massachusetts, the oratorical honors
of the time. John Adams wrote some powerful
pamphlets, and Patrick Henry, like Otis, deserves
literary mention for the fervid eloquence and artis-
tic finish of his speeches. Henry edited an edition
of Bishop Butler's Analogy of ReUgio7i.

24 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

2. George Washington as a Writer. — Though
Washington at no time in his life paid particular
attention to the arts of rhetoric, he was the master
of a clear and somewhat individual style. Without
including many productions of special interest, his
literary remains are sufficient to fill twelve large
volumes. The journal of his expedition to the
Ohio River was published at Williamsburg, Virginia,
in 1754, and hi?, Farewell Address in 1796, — a pro-
duction which would alone entitle the writer to
mention among American authors. The rest of
his collected works consist of addresses, messages,
and correspondence. As a letter-writer Washington
excelled, like Franklin ; and during his life-time
he was compelled to make out a list of spurious
letters attributed to him, the popularity of his
correspondence having led to such forgeries.

3. Thomas Jefferson was probably the best
educated man of his time, having been fortunate
in his instructors and zealous in the prosecution
of his studies. Many branches of learning he had
pursued beyond the usual limit, and he excelled in
literary composition, though he was no orator. His
Notes on Virgi7zia were written for the information
of the French government, and were published
in 1784. They include many shrewd observations
and interesting suggestions. Jefferson's somewhat
voluminous correspondence may be considered his
most graceful literary monument, though the Decla-

THE FEDERALIST. 2$

ration of Independence, which he wrote, will always
be considered one of the most remarkable of public
documents, aside from its political importance.

4. The Federalist was a collection of essays
published periodically, and arguing in favor of the
Constitution of the United States, adopted in 1789.
There were eighty-five numbers in all, of which the
first seventy-six appeared in T/ze Independent Journal,
a. semi-weekly newspaper published in New York.
The publication began on October 27, 1787, and
ceased, as far as the journal was concerned, on
April 2, 1788. T/ie Federalist was the concerted
work of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and
John Jay, who adopted no separate signatures, but
wrote over the common signature of Publius. The
letters were addressed to the people of New York,
in order to induce that State to support the pro-
posed national Constitution. The purpose of the
publication was controversial, for the Constitution
had been so sharply attacked that its friends per-
ceived the necessity of rallying to its defence. The
original idea was Hamilton's, and he drew up the
plan of the series. The completed work does not
form a systematic treatise, but covers many ques-
tions of government which every student of political
science must consider. The authors had a special
end in view, and they were zealous to show the
colonists that advantage and danger united in de-
manding the adoption of a Federal Constitution. In

26 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

the light of later experience the wisdom and fore-
thought of the writers are apparent. The work has
been repeatedly issued, and is recognized as a
standard authority on the elementary principles of
government.

5. Thomas Paine was a prominent figure in Rev-
olutionary literature. Born in England in 1737, he
started in life as a stay-maker and dissenting
preacher, meanwhile getting a general knowledge
of literature by such promiscuous reading as he
could do at odd moments. Becoming angry with
the British government in consequence of his dis-
missal from the revenue service, he came to America
in 1774 and obtained speedy notoriety as a political
writer. His Serious Thoughts on Slavery was a
magazine article printed in 1775. Common Sense^
a political pamphlet, advocating a declaration of
independence and the formation of a republic, had
a vast circulation, and exerted no small influence.
At the end of 1776 Paine started a periodical
called The Crisis^ which was published, at no stated
interval, for some time, and had a multitude of
readers. His patriotic services during the war were"^
appreciated and rewarded, though his temper got
him into occasional trouble. The Rights of Man^ a
vindication of the French Revolution, appeared in
1791 and 1792, and he wrote The Age of Reaso7i in
1794 and 1795, partly in a French prison. The
latter work has always had a wide circulation,

POETS. . 2^

chiefly among the lower classes. It advocates a
pure -deism, but its method of criticism and temper
of attack are now generally repudiated by more
scholarly writers of the same school.

6. Poets. — Philip Freneau, a Huguenot by de-
scent and a New Yorker by birth, was the first
American poet to attain eminence, though there
were a multitude of anonymous ballad-writers dur-
ing the war. Freneau graduated at the College of
New Jersey in 1771, studying at that institution
with James Madison. He published four volumes,
and his political burlesques were very popular dur-
ing the war. Probably he was the first American
poet to find readers in England. John Trumbull's
Progress of Dullness and Elegy on the Times attracted
no great attention; but his McFingal (1782), a
satirical poem in the style of Butler's Hudibras^
had a great circulation. Some of its lines are still
popularly assigned to Butler. Francis Hopkinson
and Robert Treat Paine, Jr., were other patriotic
and humorous versifiers. Joel Barlow's Vision of
Colu7iibus (1787) was for a time a favorite, and his
graver Columbiad, an expansion of the preceding,
issued in 1808, was the first attempt at a national
epic. It is stiff and stately, but occasionally rises
into merit. Barlow is better known by a poem on
"hasty-pudding." Phillis Wheatley, a Massadiu-
setts negress, published a volume of verse in Lon-
don in 1773 ; and Dr. James McClurg, of Virginia,

28 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE:

wrote graceful poems_ of compliment. But all the
American poetry of the time, even the most patri-
otic, was in humble imitation of English models.

7. The First Novelist. — Charles Brockden
Brown's Wielafzd, printed in 1798, introduced fic-
tion into American literature. The slow appear-
ance of the novel was not strange, for, with the
exception of De Foe, the English novelists them-
selves had failed to win much celebrity before the
latter half of the eighteenth century. Ormond was
Brown's second novel, and the two books received
prompt approval. Arthur Mervyn, the third novel,
was equally successful, and a better story than
either. All Brown's stories are told in a graphic
style, and their author had no lack of imagination.
Later writers have supplanted him, and the prevail-
ing impression of gloom left by his books has not
served to make them permanent favorites. Brown,
it should be added, started a monthly magazine,
and was the first of our authors to make his whole
living out of literature.

8. Historians and Other Writers. — The his-
tories written during the last century are chiefly
useful as authorities for later writers. David Ram-
say prepared works of some value. Jeremy Belknap
wrote a History of New Hampshire and a useful
series of biographies. Hannah Adams's History of
New Ejigland was the first standard book written
by a New England woman, but its merit does not

HISTORIANS AND OTHER WRITERS. 29

leave this fact as its only distinction. Dr. Abiel
Holmes's Annals of America is of service as a sys-
tematic compilation of leading events. In biog-
raphy, William Wirt wrote a readable life of Patrick
Henry ; and Chief Justice John Marshall prepared
a standard life of Washington. John Ledyard, a
daring explorer, started the fashion for travel by
publishing the records of his exploits. Scientific
research was given a start by the writings of Dr.
Benjamin Rush in medicine, Alexander Wilson in
ornithology, Samuel Latham Mitchill in chemistry,
Benjamin Smith Barton in botany, and Benjamin
Thompson, Count Rumford, in physics. Some of
the writers of this time would not attract attention
nowadays, and not all, even, of those here men-
tioned, wrote as well as later authors whose names
will be necessarily omitted in this book. Washing-
ton Irving once jocosely said of himself that he
attracted attention because Englishmen were sur-
prised to see an American with a quill in his hand
and not on his head. But greater credit always
belongs to the pioneer ; and it must be remembered
that many authors of the eighteenth century wrote
with meagre libraries, with a slender reading public
to address, with no possibility of making literature
a livelihood, and with greater competition from
foreign sources than that of which complaint is
still made.

CHAPTER HI.

1812-1861.

I. Theological Changes. — The increasing im-
portance of political affairs, together with the growth
in size and prosperity of the whole nation, served
to deprive theology of its preeminent place in Amer-
ican literature, though only the relative number of
volumes on religious subjects was diminished. The
beginning of the present century, however, was
marked by a considerable controversial excitement
among the New England clergy, incident to the
spread of Unitarian views in and around Boston.
Harvard University was the centre of interest, and
the election of a Unitarian to the Hollis professor-
ship of divinity in that institution, in 1805, excited
great attention. The change in the Congregational
churches of Massachusetts had been a gradual one,
for, as James Russell Lowell has pointed out, many
of the Congregational divines of Boston and Cam-
bridge had been regarded with suspicion by their
stricter brethren, even during the eighteenth cen-
tury. In 1785, the very year of the appearance of
the first American Episcopal prayer-book, King's
Chapel, in Boston, the pioneer Episcopal society in

THEOLOGICAL CHANGES. 3 1

New England, had stricken out all Trinitarian ex-
pressions from its liturgy; while as early as 1718
an Arian had been ordained over the Hingham
church. The war of pamphlets and books began
in 181 2, simultaneously with the second conflict
between England and the United States. The
Unitarian leaders were William Ellery Channing,
the Henry Wares, father and son, and Andrews
Norton ; while the conservative Congregationalists
were championed by Samuel Worcester, of Salem,
and Moses Stuart and Leonard Woods, professors
in the theological seminary at Andover. The Pano-
plist was established as the Trinitarian and The
Christian Examiner as the Unitarian organ; and
the discussion was carried on with great ability on
both sides, and with a suitable degree of courtesy,
though it was impossible to debate matters in which
the nature of God and the destiny of the soul were
concerned without considerable earnestness of lan-
guage. In later years Lyman Beecher, the Alex-
anders and Professor Charles Hodge, of the Pres-
byterian seminary at Princeton, William G. T. Shedd,
of Andover Seminary, President Hopkins, of Will-
iams College, Dr. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, Dr.
John Todd, of Pittsfield, and Professor Edwards A,
Park, of Andover, have written in defence of the
Trinitarian side. More recent Unitarian writers
have been Orville Dewey, William H. Furness,
James Freeman Clarke, Henry W. Bellows, Andrew

S2 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

P. Peabody, and William Rounseville Alger. The
Unitarians themselves have not desired to keep
within their denominational limits such persons as
could find greater freedom of thought outside ; and
Theodore Parker, though remaining to the end of
his life a devout and earnest theist, in his latter
years ceased to work in connection with any organ-
ized branch of Christianity. Parker was born at
Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1810, was a prodigy
of general learning and a marvel of industry, and
excelled both as a preacher and a writer. In 1844
he was refused admission to several Unitarian pul-
pits in Boston, and during that and subsequent years
the interest in his extremely radical views caused
the last religious excitement which had any general
effect on American literature. Parker died at Flor-
ence in i860.

2. William Ellery Channing, of the writers
we have named, deserves the most prominent men-
tion in a literary history. He was born at New-
port in 1780, and although of slight figure and not
very firm health, he began to be a hard student at
an early age, graduating at Harvard when he was
eighteen. His health was then somewhat impaired,
and he went to Virginia as a teacher ; but the return
voyage, in 1800, was so severe that he remained
a permanent invalid all his life. In 1803 he
became pastor of a Boston church, and soon was
famous as a finished orator. His style was nothing

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 33

less than charming, and his Remarks on the Life and
Character of Napoleon Bonaparte, published in 1828,
gave him a European reputation. Many of his
sermons were published, and he was continually
giving addresses at ordinations and literary anni-
versaries, which occasions he used to make notable
by the presentation of carefully prepared opinions
on the leading religious and political questions of
the time. He had returned from Virginia an un-
compromising opponent of slavery, and he argued
against it to the day of his death. Strange to say,
he paid no attention to literary composition, and
hated controversy; but his opinions were firmly
established and his method of expression straight-
forward ; so that his writings have a strong sweep.
He had no need to remember even the old maxim,
that art is to conceal art ; for he spoke and wrote
in the simplest and most natural way, and was sur-
prised to find himself considered eloquent. His
ideas of the sacredness of conscience were almost
superstitious, and he thought the rights of the
pleader ended with the solicitation toward obedi-
ence to the dictates of one's own sense of duty.
His literary papers show what his reputation would
have been had he confined himself to polite letters.
His works fill six volumes, and are still found
worthy of study, for they retain a considerable
popularity in America and England, despite the
temporary character of most of the subjects of the

34 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE.

various lectures and essays. Channing died in
1842, at the age of sixty-two.

3. Other Theological Writers. — It will be
best to finish at this place the enumeration of the
other leading religious writers of the century. The
principal theological work that has appeared since
Edwards's famous treatise is the Systematic Theology
of Charles Hodge, professor in Princeton seminary.
Dr. Hodge was born in Philadelphia in 1797 , grad-
uated at Princeton in 1815; and was connected with
the seminary from 1820 to 1878. He founded
a review in 1825, which is still published, and
which for half a century supported the Presby-
terian tenets of faith. A few commentaries, a
Presbyterian church history, and a religious manual
preceded the extensive work previously mentioned,
which appeared in 187 1 and 1872. No abler expo-
sition of Calvinistic principles has been made since
Edwards, and Dr. Hodge covered more ground than
his predecessor. The whole treatise is carefully
elaborated, and represents the patient labor of a
life-time. James McCosh, who became president of
Princeton College in 1868, had won a reputation as
a philosopher and theologian before his departure
from Belfast, Ireland. But since he has made the
United States his home, mention should be made
-of the principal works he has published in this
country. They are The Laws of Discursive Thought
(1869); ChristiaJiiiy and Positivism (187 1), a reply

OTHER THEOLOGICAL WRITERS. 35

to the school of John Stuart Mill ; and The Scottish
Philosophy (1874), a popular history, defence, and
exposition of the metaphysical school to which the
author belongs. Two other college presidents —
Mark Hopkins of Williams and Noah Porter of
Yale — have devoted much thought and ability to
mental science. Dr. Hopkins's influence has been
personal, to a considerable extent, but his Evidences
of Christianity and Law of Love have put his argu-
ments before the outside world. Dr. Porter is the
author of a larger work on The Human Lntelkcf, an
elaborate and thorough manual of philosophy, of
which the author has prepared an abridgment.
Thomas C. Upham, professor in Bowdoin College,
wrote in 1831 a work on the Elements of Mental
Philosophy, long the principal text-book on the sub-
ject in American schools. James Marsh, president
of the University of Vermont between 1826 and
1833, exerted considerable influence in popularizing
the transcendental philosophy of Coleridge in this
country, though his writings were fragmentary.
Laurens P. Hickok, long connected with Union
College, Schenectady, has expounded in several
works the doctrine of "the necessary distinctions
in the intellectual functions of the sense, the under-
standing, and the reason," — the quotation is from
President Seelye of Amherst, — and this doctrine
he chiefly elaborated in his volume. The Logic of
Reaso?i. His literary style is obscure. Francis

36 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE,

Wayland, . president of Brown University, Provi-
dence, from 1827 to 1855, wrote excellent text-
books of ethics, philosophy, and political economy
(from the free-trade standpoint). Tayler Lewis,
professor in Union College, was linguist, philoso-
pher, and scientist; and, though holding opinions
of the stoutest orthodoxy, foreshadowed in Science
and the Bible (1857) some of the results of later
biological investigations. Philip Schaff, a native
of Switzerland, who came to the United States in
1844, has written the early volumes of a projected
History of the Christian Church, and has been an
industrious editor of Lange's extended commentary
on the Bible, as well as of the principal creeds of
Christendom. Another leadmg work in church
history is Professor W. G. T. Shedd's History of
Christian Doctrine (Calvinistic), against which W. R.
Alger's radical History of the Doctrine of the Future
Life may be matched in ability, though hardly in
dignity. Denominational histories have been pre-
pared for the Episcopalians by Bishop William
Stevens Perry ; for the Congregationalists by George
Punchard and Henry M. Dexter; for the Presby-
terians by E. H. Gillett; and for the Methodists
by Abel Stevens. Of these the last is the most
noticeable. George Bush, Henry James, and The-
ophilus Parsons have expounded Swedenborgian
doctrines. Drs. T. J. Conant of the Baptists, Albert
Barnes of the Presbyterians, John McClintock of

OTHER THEOLOGICAL WRITERS. 3/

the Methodists, and Ezra Abbot of the Unitarians
have been experts in biblical study. Few notable
works from Roman Catholic sources have appeared,
though Archbishops Martin J. Spalding and John
Hughes were forcible and somewhat voluminous
writers. A foundation for lectures on preaching at
the Yale Theological Seminary has given our litera-
ture an excellent little library of works on homi-
letics, in which volumes have appeared by Henry
Ward Beecher, John Hall, William M. Taylor, and
Phillips Brooks. Mr. Beecher has been, both in
the pulpit and the press, an active supporter of the
more liberal Congregational ideas, and his miscella-
neous publications cover a wide range. The other
principal exponents of less stringent views in the
historic New England theology have been Drs.
Nathaniel W. Taylor, of Yale, President Charles
G. Finney, of Oberlin, and Horace Bushnell, of
Hartford. Dr. Bushnell wrote God in Christy Nat-
ure and the Supernatural^ The Vicarious Sacrifice,
and other works, chiefly in defence of a "moral
influence " theory of the atonement, and written
with much ripeness of thought and beauty of style.
And so we close the long list of later theologians.
We have seen that, to the last, philosophy has been
mainly regarded as a defence and illustration of
theology, and that American metaphysics have
been, in consequence, at once less brilliant and
less destructive than English or German. This

38 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE,

record now returns to the miscellaneous literature
of the country, which had made but a modest figure
before the second war with England.

4. The Knickerbocker School. — " The Knick-
erbocker writers " is a loose and not very useful
term applied to certain authors who began to write
soon after the beginning of the century, who were
for the most part residents of New York, and who
were in some cases descendants of the old Dutch
stock. After the Knickerbocker Magazine was
established some of them became its contributors,
and this fact caused the nickname to cling longer
than it otherwise would have done. For the sake
of convenience the members of the coterie may
be considered in order, including under this head
the names of Washington Irving, James Kirke
Paulding, Joseph Rodman Drake, and Fitz-Greene
Halleck.

5. Washington Irving was a native of New
York city, born in 1783, and growing up in fa-
miliarity with its sights and characteristics. His
father was of an old Scotch family, and his mother
was an Englishwoman. They were married before
coming to this country. The boy's older brothers
had rather marked literary tastes, and under
their guidance and example he soon began to read
such of the English authors as his father's library
contained. At nineteen he wrote for a newspaper
edited by his brother Peter, taking up theatrical

WASHINGTON- IRVING. 39

and social topics, and using the name of Jonathan
Oldstyle. This pseudonym describes the nature
and tone of these youthful productions with suffi-
cient accuracy. In 1804, attacked by a slight
malady of the lungs, Irving sailed for Bordeaux,
whence, after various tours in the Mediterranean
and Italy, he went to Paris for a few months'
residence. Taking Belgium and Holland on the
way, he next settled for a time in London. He
met Washington Allston, the painter, in Rome, and
half made up his mind to abandon literature for
art. He returned to New York in 1806, with a
wide European experience and a great store of
literary material. At home again, he at once set
himself to work, and the next year started a fort-
nightly periodical after the style of the English
essayists of the eighteenth century. Salmagundi
was the title, and it professed to give the "whim-
whams and opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Es-
quire." Like Addison, Irving had the help of other
literary friends in his enterprise, Paulding aiding
him in the prose and his brother William furnish-
ing the poetry. The social follies and fashions of
the day were satirized in a vein of genial humor,
and the work is therefore a good picture of by-
gone customs. There is a story running through
the whole, and most of the characters mentioned
were real persons. Cockloft Hall, which figured
prominently in the periodical, was a fine old house

40 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

(still standing, though so modernized as to be
unrecognizable) on the bank of the Passaic River
in Newark. In December, 1809, K7iickerbocker'' s
History of New York appeared. Washington
Irving and Peter Irving began it as a parody on
a popular handbook issued a short time before,
and its historical style was a burlesque of the lan-
guage of a sketch printed in that publication.
When Peter Irving went to Europe, Washington
determined to continue the historical burlesque,
and to make it a longer and independent comic
history. An air of verisimilitude- was given it by
the publication of some preliminary notices con-
cerning the finding of the manuscript in the Co-
lumbian Hotel, in Mulberry Street ; and not a few
persons were dull enough to be deceived by its
evident but very delicate pleasantry. Some de-
scendants of the Dutchmen took serious offence at
the personal caricatures in the book, but everybody
read it, and it was not long before it became a
national classic. We had, at length, something all
our own, which was not copied from London or
borrowed from Paris ; and the impetus thus given
to native production was very great. In 18 10
Irving wrote a short biographical sketch of the
poet Campbell, and three years later edited a
magazine in Philadelphia, which for the next few
years showed some signs of becoming the literary
capital of the country. During another trip to

WASHINGTON IRVING. 4 1

Europe he began to publish the Sketch Book, in
numbers, and it was a success both in London and
New York. Irving had won the warm friendship
of Sir Walter Scott, who induced the London pub-
lisher, Murray, to accept his book and pay the
round price of ;^2oo for it. Murray afterwards
doubled this sum, and Irving soon found himself
in receipt of revenues from his pen much greater
than Charles Brockden Brown, his only American
predecessor as a professional author, ever enjoyed.
The Sketch Book contained the Legend of Sleepy
Hollow and Rip Van Winkle; and readers per-
ceived that a new master of prose style had arisen,
as well as a delicate humorist and a man iji sym-
pathy with the human heart. In 1820 and 182 1
Irving was in Paris, and in the latter year Mur-
ray paid him the enormous price of ;^ 1,000 for
Bracebridge Hall, a picture of English country life.
In 1824 ;^i,5oo was paid by the same publisher
for the Tales of a Traveller, a work of similar char-
acter, and containing stories of greater interest.
Strange to say, it met with sharp criticism both in
England and the United States. Two years later
Alexander H. Everett, then minister to Spain, gave
Irving a commission to translate some recently col-
lected documents concerning Columbus. This was
the basis of Irving's Life and Voyages of Christopher
Columbus, published in London in 1828, which was
sold for three thousand guineas. Irving was now

42 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

as successful both in fame and money as the best
English authors who wrote at that period of high
literary remuneration. This biographical work was
kindly received by the critics, and seems to have
determined Irving to cultivate the Spanish field
further. The Chronicles of the Conquest of Granada
followed, the author having made another tour in
the south of Spain. It was a losing venture, and
attracted no general praise; but Irving wrote still
another Spanish book on the Voyages of the Compan-
ions of Columbus, which appeared in 1831. The
Alhambra (1832) was a sort of Spanish edition of
Bracebridge Hall. After serving for a time as sec-
retary of legation in London, Irving returned home
in 1832, received a public dinner, and determined
to explore the wilds of the West, in lieu of Castilian
antiquity. His Tour on the Prairies (1835) was
issued, with some European sketches, in a volume
entitled The Crayon MiscellaJiy, which took its
name from the author's pseudonym of Geoffrey
Crayon, Gentleman. Astoria, the obscurest of his
books, described Irving's youthful visits to the
Montreal station of the Northwest Fur Company,
and embodied accounts of early fur-trading expe-
ditions in Oregon, by John Jacob Astor and others.
Miscellaneous contributions to the Knickerbocker
Magazine occupied the author until his appoint-
ment, in 1842, as minister to Spain. Coming
back in 1846, he enlarged a very agreeable biog-

JAMES KIRKE PAULDING. 43

raphy of Oliver Goldsmith, in which he hit Dr.
Johnson some hard raps, and also went to work on
Mahomet aiid his Successors, published in 1850.
About the same time he subjected the whole of
his previous works to slight revisions, and a new
and uniform edition was brought out. Undeterred
by advancing age (he was now 67), Irving set to
work upon his largest labor, the Life of Washington,
the fifth and last volume of which was published
three months before his death, in 1859. This work
had an army of readers, and deserved them, for it
embodied all the accessible facts concerning Wash-
ington's life, in the felicitous style of one of the
greatest masters of English. The earlier works,
however, are most prized by the author's public,
and the Sketch Book, on the whole, remains the best
example of his powers, combining, as it does,
humor, pathos, and a wonderful felicity of descrip-
tion. Irving never married, but kept bachelor's hall
in an attractive fashion at his cottage of " Sunny-
side " in Tarrytown.

6. James Kirke Paulding was five years older
than Irving, having been born in 1778 in the town
of Nine Partners, in Dutchess County, New York.
He also survived Irving for a similarly brief period,
dying in Hyde Park, New York, in i860. William
Irving was his brother-in-law, and Paulding took up
his abode in the house of that gentleman, in New
York, in 1797. Of course, having literary tastes of

44 ^ PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

his own, he fell in heartily with the plans of his
every-day associates, and worked upon Salmagundi
with enthusiasm, when that short-lived periodical
was started. Paulding was an office-holder a good
part of his life, being secretary to the board of navy
commissioners in 1815, navy agent at New York for
a dozen years, and secretary of the navy during the
administration of Van Buren. He began his career
as a poet; brought out, single-handed, in 18 19, a
second series of Salmagundi; and during all his life
was constantly writing poems, novels, humorous
sketches, and pamphlets. The Dutchman's Fireside,
a novel published in 183 1, is his best work ; though,
like Irving, he wrote a considerable life of Washing-
ton. Paulding's mark on American literature was
not a permanent one, though sufficient interest
remained in his writings to warrant the publication
of a revised edition of the best of them in 1867
and 1868.

7. Joseph Rodman Drake was a sort of Amer-
ican Keats in that he wrote little, died young, and
has kept a permanent place in the standard library.
At the time of his death (1820) he was only twenty-
five, having been a resident of New York all his
life. Poverty was his lot at the first, but he con-
trived to study medicine, taking his degree in 18 16.
Marrying a rich wife was his deliverance, and he
was thus enabled to spend much of his time with
Fenimore Cooper and Fitz-Greene Halleck, mean-

FITZ-GREENE HALLECK. 45

while maturing plans for literary labor. The Cul~
.i>rit Fay, his chief work, appeared in 1819, having
been written in consequence of a discussion between
Drake, Cooper, and Halleck concerning the poetry
of American rivers. In 18 19, having been to Eu-
rope, he united with Halleck to contribute satirical
verses to the newspapers, under the name of
" Croaker," or " Croaker, Jr." The American Flagy
a national lyric of much spirit, keeps Drake's name
in the school readers. He died of consumption in
1820, thus completing the parallel to Keats. It is
useless to speculate on the possibilities of his career
had he lived ; but surely none of our poets, unless
it be Bryant, wrote so well while yet under age.

8. Fitz-Greene Halleck was almost exactly a
contemporary of Irving and Paulding, having been
born at Guilford, Connecticut, in 1790, and dying
there in 1867. He removed to New York in 181 1,
and became clerk in a banking-house, but after-
wards went into the office of John Jacob Astor.
Halleck, Charles Sprague, Hiram Rich, and Ed-
mund C. Stedman, of our poets, have resembled
the English Samuel Rogers in being connected
with banking. Halleck wrote little poems when a
boy, some of which he contrived to get printed in
the newspapers. But when he formed his literary
partnership with Drake, though twenty-eight years
old, he had no great reputation." He wrote little
more than Drake, and his martial poem, Marco

46 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE.

Bozzaris (first published in a volume in 1827) has
remained his virtual title to fame, though he wrote
a long poem called Fanny, and lesser pieces en-
titled Alnwick Castle and Burns, which have their
admirers. On Drake's death he produced an ex-
cellent poem, four lines of which promptly passed
into the paradise of current quotation. With the
mention of his poem on Twilight, it is only neces-
sary to add that Halleck retired to Guilford in 1849
on a pension of two hundred dollars a year, given
by the will of John Jacob Astor. Halleck edited an
excellent edition of Byron, as well as two volumes
of selections from the British poets.

9. Other Early Poets. — Richard Henry Dana
was born in 1787, and in early life, having studied
at Harvard, was associated with the club of gentle-
men, headed by William Tudor, which established
The North American Review in 18 15. Strangely,
the venerable Mr. Dana did not receive his degree
of Bachelor of Arts until 1866, at the age of seventy-
eight, having participated in the famous Harvard
rebellion of 1807. Like his New York contem-
poraries, he published an essay-serial called The
Idle Man, on which Bryant and Washington Alls-
ton gave him some help. The Buccaneer, with
other excellent and carefully written poems, ap-
peared in 1827, and this piece remains his best
achievement. His prose essays are graceful and
his poetical style worthy of comparison with that of

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 4/

the British poets of the elder day. Charles Sprague,
a Bostonian who never went ten miles from his
home, was another writer who deserves mention for
the quality rather than the quantity of his verse.
His Ode on Shakespeare is a remarkable and admi-
rable production. Richard Henry Wilde, a native
of Dublin and a member of Congress from Georgia,
wrote a good Life of Tasso, a long poem entitled
Ifesperia, and a famous lyric beginning, My Life is
like a Summer Rose. Other poets made celebrated
by single pieces were Francis Scott Key, whose
Star Spangled Banner was written^ during the siege
of Fort MeHenry, Baltimore, in the war of 1812 ;
Samuel Woodworth, who wrote The Old Oaken
Bucket ; John Howard Payne, whose Home, Sweet
Home was first made public in a play ; Albert G.
Greene, the author of Old Grimes is Dead; and
William Augustus Muhlenberg, whose / would ?iot
live alway is one of the most famous of hymns.
Washington Allston, the artist, wrote some medi-
ocre poetry and a tolerably good novel. J. G. C.
Brainard and James A. Hillhouse were the suc-
cessors of Trumbull in Connecticut. Hillhouse
was the author of somewhat heavy poems and
dramas on religious subjects, Hadad coming under
the latter head, and being his best-known produc-
tion.

10. William Cullen Bryant connected the
earlier and later days of our literature ; for, unlike

48 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN- LITER A TURE.

Mr. Dana, he continued his activity as an author
to the end of his hfe, in 1878. He was born in
Cummmgton, Massachusetts, in 1794, his father
being the village physician and a man of good
mental powers. Of all examples of literary pre-
cocity Bryant is the most remarkable. At the age
of ten he was writing verse for the country papers,
and at fourteen he brought out a couple of political
poems, The Embargo and The Spanish Revolution.
They were received wnth such favor that it was
difificult to persuade the public that they were the
work of a boy of fourteen. A second edition ap-
peared in 1809, with certifications to that effect.
In 1810 Bryant entered Williams College, but did
not graduate, receiving, like Dana, his bachelor's
degree many years afterward. While in college
he was famous as a writer and reader. Taking the
law for his profession, he printed in 18 17 his
celebrated poem of ThaJiatopsis, choosing as the
vehicle The North American Review, which he
began as a bi-monthly and a general literary mag-
azine. The poem has since been greatly changed,
but even in its earliest form it plianly showed the
arrival of an American poet greater than any who
had preceded him. Though the poem has death
for its subject, it contains, like the Psalms of
David, no absolute expression concerning the con-
scious immortality of the soul ; yet it has been
universally accepted by Christians as an embodi-

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 49

ment of right views of .life and death; omitting,
perhaps, but not denying. In 1821 Bryant read
a long poem on The Ages, before the Phi Beta
Kappa Society at Harvard, and the same year
collected a few of his poems in a volume published
at Cambridge. In 1825 he removed to New York,
and became editor of the United States Review, for
which he wrote largely. The next year he became
editorially connected with the Evening Post, then a
strong Federalist paper, but changed by Bryant
into an organ of Democracy and free trade. A
little bound volume, called The Talisman, appeared
annually for three years, beginning in 1827, Robert
C. Sands and Gulian C. Verplanck doing some of
the writing, and Bryant the rest. It only differed
from The Idle Man and Salmagundi in its wider
scope, less frequent issue, and possession of covers.
At this time Bryant wrote occasional short stories.
In 1832 he brought out a new edition of his poems,
which, thanks to the influence of Irving, was re-
issued in London. Kit North praised it in Black-
wood, and the poet's position became secure, both
abroad and at home. Between 1834 and 1849
Bryant was thrice in Europe, and wrote of his
journeyings in a prose work called Letters of a
Traveller. A second series of these letters followed
another journey in 1858. By 1864 Mr. Bryant,
though a very slow and painstaking writer, had
accumulated enough additional poems to make a

50 ^ PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE,

thin volume. Of all his pieces, besides Thana-
topsis, those entitled To a Waterfowl, A Forest
Hymn, and The PlaJtting of the Apple-Tree are the
best. Bryant is the poet of nature, whose various
moods are accurately depicted in his polished verse.
A certain coldness can fairly be charged against
him, but no underlying lack of human sympathy.
After passing his seventieth birthday, he deter-
mined to translate the Iliad of Homer. Although,
unlike certain other celebrated translators, he was
not compelled to learn the language, he prepared
himself thoroughly for the task, and published in
1869 a version which, notwithstanding the constant
agitation in England, for twenty years, of the ques-
tion of Homeric translation, has been very gener-
ally accepted as a good English Homer. It is in
unrhymed heroic pentameter. A similar translation
of the Odyssey appeared in 187 1. By a fortunate
circumstance, the short period since 1867 has seen
the appearance in America of new versions of the
Iliad, Odyssey, Divine Comedy, yEneid, and Faust,
each of which has at once taken a creditable place
among translations in English. Of the last three
mention will be made under the names of their
respective translators.

II. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the
third in age of the greater American poets, — Bryant
and Emerson having been his seniors, and Whittier
ten months his junior, though both were born in

X<i<lA.WV ^A( .^0-K.-<lvP=

«-AX.*9-t^

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 5 I

1807. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, of
a courtly and well-to-do family. When fourteen
years old, he entered Bowdoin College, where he
graduated in 1825 in the class with Nathaniel
Hawthorne. It is a circumstance without precedent
that the two persons who are by many considered
the first poet arid the first prose writer of the coun-
try received their bachelor's degree at the same
time and from the same hands. Other members of
this remarkable class were George B. Cheever, John
S. C. Abbott, and S. S. Prentiss. William Pitt
Fessenden, John P. Hale, and Franklin Pierce were
also in college at the time. Like Bryant, Longfellow
at first determined to be a lawyer, but the year after
graduation, though but nineteen, he was offered the
professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin, to
qualify himself for which position he spent three
years of study in Europe. From 1829, after his
return, until 1835 ^^ occupied the chair, writing
short poems, and printing prose articles in The North
A77ierican Review. His first book was a little essay
on the moral and devotional poetry of Spain, includ-
ing translations of the Coplas de Manrique and some
of Lope de Vega's sonnets. In 1835 he was chosen
to succeed George Ticknor, who had just resigned
the chair of modern languages at Harvard, a posi-
tion in filling which the university authorities have
always shown remarkable wisdom. This professor-
ship he continued to hold until 1854, when he re-

S2 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

signed and was succeeded by James Russell Lowell.
With occasional trips to Europe, he continued to
reside in Cambridge until his death in 1882, occupy-
ing the stately old house used by Washington for
his head-quarters in 1775.

12. Longfellow's Poems. — Voices of the Night,
his first original volume, appeared in 1839, and in-
cluded the best of the author's poems written up to
that date ; among them, some produced in his un-
dergraduate days at Bowdoin. He was luckier than
Tennyson in the reception given to his first venture,
for A Psalm of Life, The Reaper and the Flowers, and
Woods in Winter were among the pieces included,
almost every one of which at once became a popular
favorite. Ballads and Other Poems — among them
The Skeleton in Armor, The Rainy Day, and The Vil-
lage Blacksmith — appeared in 1842 ; and also a
slender collection of Poe77is on Slavery, generally
considered the least meritorious of the poet's works.
The Spaiiish Student (1843), "^ capital drama, intro-
duced an element of humor which Mr. Longfellow,
with a single exception, did not afterwards cultivate.
The Belfry of Bruges, mainly original poems, with a
few translations, came in 1846. The next year,
1847, ^^- Longfellow began the publication of sev-
eral poems which had a powerful effect in stimulat-
ing the growth of a literature devoted to American
subjects. Evangeline was the first, written in hex-
ameters, a metre previously little used. In its

LONGFELLOW'S POEMS. 53

employment Mr. Longfellow has had plenty of fol-
lowers, but none have succeeded in its use save
Arthur H. Clough, an English poet who resided in
America for a time, and William D. Howells. The
latter writer, unlike Longfellow, introduces rhymes
into the metre. The Seaside and the Fireside (minor
poems) and The Golden Legend came between
Evangeline and Hiawatha (1855), another American
poem, this time on an Indian subject, and written
in a second unfamiliar metre, trochaic octosyllables.
In it were embodied many Indian legends industri-
ously collected by the author, and put into a form
that proved attractive to multitudes of Americans,
and wholly novel to the English public, which had
already given to Longfellow greater favor than it
had ever shown to Tennyson. The Courtship of
Miles Standish (1858) was a semi-humorous poem of
colonial days, also in hexameters. In Tales of a
Wayside Inn (1863), the expedient was adopted of
embodying, as tales told at a chance gathering in
an old inn at Sudbury, several long poems on vari-
ous subjects. Two additional series have since
appeared. Mr. Longfellow's distinctively American
poems closed with The New England Tragedies
(1868), two stern colonial dramas; and in 187 1,
having published The Divine Tragedy^ a dramatic
account of the crucifixion of Christ, the author
united the two last-mentioned works and The Golden
Legend in a single volume entitled Christus. They

54 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

make a symmetrical whole, but the idea of connect-
ing them was probably conceived after the issue of
the earliest part. The Hanging of the Cra7te, a brief
domestic poem, made a sumptuous illustrated vol-
ume in 1874; and. the next year the poet read at
the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation at Bowdoin
a remarkable poem, Morituri Salutamus, which, un-
like most occasional pieces, was great and noble,
because of the author's intense personal feeling in
the event. Flower de Luce^ Aftermath, The Masque
of Pandora, Keramos, and Ultima Thule were later
book^ In the Harbor and Michcel Angelo posthu-
mou^ Throughout all Longfellow's poetry the pre-
vailing marks are grace and beauty, warmed by a
greater human sympathy than is displayed in the
writings of the majority of eminent poets.

13. Longfellow's Prose Works. — Though they
are only three in all, the prose volumes of Mr. Long-
fellow deserve to rank with the best of American
books. Daintiness is their prevailing characteristic.
Outre-Mer (1835) is a collection of sketches of
travel, with special attention to the romantic feat-
ures of continental life. Hyperion (1839) i^ ^ rounded
and interesting romance, with a quaintness which is
not artificial. It is a wonderful example of the
beauty of the English language. Kavanagh (1849)
is a shorter tale, written in a more popular, but
idyllic, style. It should be mentioned that an essay
on Anglo-Saxon literature, published more than

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 55

forty years ago, gave the first considerable impulse
to the study of that language, in which American
scholars have since done more work than their
English contemporaries.

1 4. Longfellow's Dante. — All through his
poetry Mr. Longfellow shows the influence of his
familiar acquaintance with foreign literature, and
•almost all of his collected volumes have contained
a few translations. In the autumn of 1867, a
volume a month, appeared his translation of the
Divine Comedy of pante, of which he had long been
a profound student. It closely follows the metre
of the original, line by line ; and may be said
to have shortened the reign of the old-fashioned
loose school of translators, like Chapman, Dryden,
and Pope. The spirit as well as the form of the
original is preserved ; and Mr. Longfellow, besides
giving a version of Dante which is incomparably
superior to its predecessors, has influenced, by his
work, quite a body of American literalists. This
fidelity and sympathy is gained, however, at the
expense of tripping ease of language, and the trans-
lation must be considered rather hard reading, a
circumstance partly due to the frequent presence
of the feminine ending of the verse.

15. John Greenleaf Whittier, although always
the most industrious and conscientious of authors,
never attained high popularity until recent years,
when, by common consent, he has been ranked with

56 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

the first of American poets. A poor boy, of Quaker
parentage, he began life as a farm hand and shoe-
maker, going to the village school in the winter
months. His first poetical efforts, written when he
was but seventeen, were published in the Newbury-
port Free Press, edited by William Lloyd Garrison,
and he subsequently contributed verses to the
Haverhill (Massachusetts) Gazette, published near
his birthplace. He afterwards contrived to spend
two years at the academy in that town. In 1829 he
began to be connected with journalism in Boston,
where, as well as in Hartford, Haverhill, Phila-
delphia, and Washington, he edited newspapers
until 1839, and in 1847 he became corresponding
editor of Dr. Gamaliel Bailey's National Era, of
Washington, to which he contributed many poems,
reformatory and otherwise. He early identified
himself with the movement for the abolition of
slavery, aiding in the establishment of the American
Antislavery Society at Philadelphia ; and of this act
he has said that, though not insensible to literary
reputation, he set a higher value on his " name as
appended to the Antislavery Declaration of 1833
than on the title-page of any book." Legends of New
England (iS 7,1) w^s the title of his first collection
of poems, but after that and throughout the long
antislavery agitation, his poems were chiefly reform-
atory, and directed to awakening the people to the
horrors of slavery and the wickedness of any cojn-

(JdAJc^ue)~^,^i^

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 5/

promise or complicity with those who were engaged
in the dreadful traffic. His Voices of Freedom (1841)
and The Panorama a?td other Poems (1856) contain
many poems which are full of fire and inspiration,
and glow with moral indignation and scorn. They
were sj)irit-stirring as a trumpet-blast, and a power-
ful help towards the downfall of slavery. His
poems, In War-Time (1863), gave him a popularity
which his adherence to the hitherto despised cause
had rendered impossible, and with the close of the
war he gladly turned his pen to gentler themes,
publishing successively Snow-Bound (1865), The
Tent on the Beach (1867), Among the Hills (1868),
Miriam (1870), The Peiinsylvania Pilgrim (1872),
Hazel-Blossoms (id)"]^, The Vision of Echard (i^'j^),
and The King^s Missive, and Other Poems (188 1).
Maud Midler is the best known of his poems, and
Barbara Frietchie (1862) the most remarkable of
those connected with the civil war. Snow-Bound is '
a genuine New England idyl, and puts between its
covers more of the spirit of the region than any
other American book. It will forever remain a
national classic. Mr. Whittier has collected the
chief of his prose writings in two volumes, and has
edited the best edition of John Woo\m.2in^s Journal.
As a writer of prose, he unites strength and grace
in an unusual degree. His biographical sketches
are valuable as contributions to political history,
and, in some cases, beautiful as the tribute of friend
to friend.

58 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

1 6. Holmes's Poems. — Oliver Wendell Holmes
was born 'in a historic house in Cambridge, just
opposite the Harvard University buildings, in 1809,
and grew up in that town before it had outgrown
its quainter local characteristics. At twenty he
graduated at Harvard, in a class whose virtues and
whose ornaments he has never ceased to celebrate
in anniversary poems. Like Bryant, Longfellow,
and Lowell, he started out as a lawyer, but soon
took up medicine, which he studied in Europe,
paying special attention to anatomy, which branch
he long taught at Harvard. The Collegian, a col-
lege periodical, received many contributions from
him, and in 1836, the year he took his medical
degree, he brought out a collected edition of his
poems in Boston, including a rhymed essay on
Poetry, read by him at Cambridge that year. From
that time he has always been the favorite Amer-
ican poet at literary anniversaries. His lyrical
facility is greater than that of any other of our
writers, and for neatness it is not too much to
say that he is the equal of Pope. That he is a
humorist has detracted from rather than added to
his reputation, for there is a popular idea that a
humorist cannot have deep feeling. In Holmes's
case this is not true, for The Last Leaf, perhaps his
best single poem, is a masterpiece of pathos. Old
Ironsides is a standard national lyric, and Holmes
wrote a good share of the few commendable poems

fi^Zur&ty ^^,^^2;^^^

HOLMES'S PROSE WORKS. 59

evoked by the civil war. Some of his best pieces —
The Deacon's Masterpiece, Parson TurelPs Legacy,
and Homesick in Heaven — have first appeared in
his longer prose works, where they have fitted into
their surroundings with exquisite appropriateness.
He has written no long poem.

17. Holmes's Prose Works. — Dr. Holmes was a
leading spirit in the establishment of The Atlantic
Monthly, which became, with its first number, the
Blackwood of Boston, and has probably printed
more articles by eminent authors within the past
twenty years than any magazine in the language.
Its prompt success was principally due to Dr.
Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, a series
of articles, half story, half essay, which were a
novelty in American literature. Their satire is
severe and yet genial, and their wit is as polished
and supple as a Damascus blade. The Professor at
the Breakfast Table, written in the same style, soon
followed; and in 1872 the author once more tried
the dangerous experiment of endeavoring to repeat
a former triumph, in which attempt he was entirely
successful. Elsie Venner, a curious novel whose
burden was inherited tendencies, appeared in i860,
and The Guardian Angel, one of the best American
Movels thus far produced, in 1867. The hero of
the latter work is a scholarly old bachelor who has
written an unsuccessful book, but who goes through
the world like a moving patch of sunshine. Dr.

6o A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Holmes prepared a biography of John Lothrop
Motley in 1878, and in 1882 and 1883 issued revised
editions of his prose works.

18. James Russell Lowell, like Holmes, has
written both poetry and prose, but it will not be
necessary to consider them in separate sections.
He, too, was born in Cambridge, in 18 19, in a spa-
cious old house which is still his home. His father
was the minister of the West Congregational Church
in Boston. Lowell graduated at Harvard in 1838,
when he was class poet, and recited a poem which
was memorable in the student literature of the time.
A law office in Boston was opened in 1840, but the
poet soon shut its doors and devoted himself en-
tirely to literature. A Year's Life (1841) included
his poems up to that date, some of which the
author has since revised, throwing away the rest.
Two years later he began the publication, in Boston,
of The Pioneer, a periodical of so high a character
that it would surely fail now, and of course promptly
came to its death at that time, though Lowell, Haw-
thorne, and Poe wrote for it. Robert Carter assisted
Lowell in editing the three numbers that appeared.
In 1844 Lowell gathered poems enough to make
another volume ; among them were A Legeiid of
Brittany and Ehoecus. Some of the sonnets were
pronounced in their antislavery sentiments, being
addressed to Wendell Phillips and' Joshua R.
Giddings. The remainder of the volume consisted

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 6 1

of pieces which indicated that a new and true poet
had arisen. The subjects were not novel, but they
were treated in a style which was a rare union of
strength and minuteness of phrase, the author's
opulence of thought preventing his nicety from
seeming artificial. A prose series of Conversations
on the Old Poets (1845) critically considered Chaucer,
George Chapman, and some obscure writers. It
found few readers, and has never been reissued,
though its author's maturer judgment has since pre-
pared critical articles on several of the authors in-
cluded, notably Chaucer. Another volume of poems
was printed in 1848, of which The Present Crisis
made a considerable sensation. The Vision of Sir
Launfal, published the same year, is the most
elaborate of the author's productions, being an
allegory of good deeds, and containing many quot-
able lines. At this time Mr. Lowell was very indus-
trious, for in 1848 he also brought out, in New
York, A Fable for Critics^ a wonderfully clever char-
acterization, in fluent verse, of the leading authors
of the day, himself included. This characteriza-
tion, though made in a humorous style, was accurate
and just, and in the case of the younger writers
mentioned its predictions have been amply verified.
At the same time appeared the first series of the
Biglow Papers^ a collection of poems in Yankee
dialect, by " Hosea Biglow," edited and furnished
with absurdly learned notes and introductions by

62 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

" Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the First Church
in Jaalam." These poems served a double purpose;
that of preserving the perishable local expressions
of New England in a permanent form, and of fight-
ing with the sharpest weapons of satire against the
extension of slavery. This work, together with the
Fable for Critics, for the first time made Mr. Lowell
a popular author, and gave him a reputation in
England, though English readers have more re-
cently discovered that he is something more than
a humorist. In 1855 Mr. Lowell succeeded Mr.
Longfellow in the chair of polite letters at Harvard,
taking a European trip before entering upon his
new duties. In 1867 a second series of the Biglow
Tapers included those poems in dialect which had
been called out by the war. They were preceded
by a critical essay in which was shown the antiquity
of many presumed Yankee peculiarities of expres-
sion. Never a fertile writer, it was not until 1869
that sufficient minor poems were collected by Mr.
Lowell to make another volume, which took its title
of Under the Willows from its leading poem. The
Commeinoration Ode, in honor of the Harvard men
who were killed in the war, was recited at Cam-
bridge in 1865, and is the author's noblest poem
and the chief literary result of the war. For con-
siderable periods Mr. Lowell was editor of The
Atlantic Monthly and The North American Review;
and his critical and miscellaneous essays in those

' OTHER POETS. 63

periodicals have been collected into volumes entitled
Among my Books (two series) and My Study Win-
dows. These books, which show their author to be
the leading American critic, are a very agreeable
union of wit and wisdom, and are the result of
extensive reading, illuminated by excellent critical
insight. The only objection ever made to them is
due to their somewhat colloquial style ; but this has
been generally regarded as one of their charms.
As literary guides and stimulants for young readers
they are unsurpassed.

19. Edgar Allan Poe was an entirely original
figure in American literature. His temperament
was melancholy ; he hated restraint of every kind ;
and he was the slave of drink. These three cir-
cumstances made his life a wretched record of
poverty and suffering. But his Bells^ Raven^ and
Annabel Lee are wonderfully melodious ; and he
was a master in that assonance and alliteration
which have since been so marked a characteristic
of the schools of Swinburne in England and
Baudelaire in France. In prose Poe wrote able
but partisan literary criticisms, and weird tales
which are much inferior to those of Hawthorne.
He was born in 1809, and died in 1849.

20. Other Poets. — American literature has been
uncommonly fertile in poets who, though they have
not reached the first rank, have written well and
proved their right to the name. James Gates Per-

54 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE.

cival, a melancholy and shy scholar, wrote A
Dream of a Day, and other pieces which have
retained popularity for their sentiment and smooth
versification. N. P. Willis and George P. Morri^s,
long associated on a New York family journal, were
poets whose reputation has not been a lasting one.
Willis wrote scriptural pieces of much power, and
his present neglect by the public is as unjust as its
previous flattery was unwise. The artificiality of
his poems has been their ruin. Morris wrote spir-
ited and popular songs, which are still sung.
Edward Coate Pinkney, of Baltimore, was the
author of lyrics which Poe insisted would have
made him famous had he lived in New England.
Charles Fenno Hoffman, still living, but long in-
curably insane, was also a facile lyrist, and wrote
a novel and books of travel. George H. Calvert
has produced many dramas and poems, but his
biographies of Goethe and Rubens are better worth
preservation. Dr. Thomas Dunn English became
famous by a single song, Ben Bolt ; he has since
devoted himself more particularly to national poems.
George H. Boker, of Philadelphia, has zealously
tried to better the condition of the meagre field
of American dramatic literature ; and some of his
plays have strength and fire. Charles T. Brooks
has made a good translation of the first part of
Faust, and has rendered many of the most famous
German lyrics into English. C. P. Cranch's trans-

OTHER POETS. 65

lation of the yEneid of Virgil, in unrhymed penta-
meter, ranks with the other books in the recent
notable series of American translations. Mr.
Cranch has also put into original poetry a painter's
color and art. The Divine Comedy of Dante has
been partially translated by Dr. T. W. Parsons, of
Boston, at the expense of his original verse, which
is of excellent quality. Alfred B. Street's numerous
poems are mainly devoted to the celebration of
nature. W. W. Story, once a neighbor and friend
of Lowell's but latterly a resident of Rome, has
joined poetry and sculpture, just as Allston and
Cranch have united poetry and painting, and with
equal success. Notwithstanding the multiplicity of
religious denominations in this country, few good
hymns have been written during the present cen-
tury. As far as literature goes, our humor has been
better than our piety. The greatest development of
American humor, in prose and verse, has been of
late years, but before the war John G. Saxe had
become famous for his clever travesties, puns, and
love poems. As a poet of pure merriment he is
unsurpassed. The first of a numerous body of
social satires was William Allen Butler's Nothing
to Wear, published in 1857. Not until recently
have we had any female poets of the first rank;
those writing before the war, save the Gary sisters,
having been almost without exception slaves, led by
Mrs. Sigourney, of the sentimentality which Mrs.

66 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Hemans and L. E. L. had made fashionable in
England.

21. Orators. — During the present century, cer-
tainly in its first half, oratory has equalled its
splendid beginning a hundred years ago. Unques-
tionably, the speeches of Daniel Webster, John
C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Edward Everett, Rufus
Choate, William H. Seward, Charles Sumner,
Robert C. Winthrop, William Lloyd Garrison, and
Wendell Phillips belong to literature. Fortunately,
the principal orations and addresses of all of them
have been well edited and issued in suitable form
for preservation and study, being in many cases
revised by the authors themselves.

2 2. Historians. — At first sight the number of
notable American historians seems small ; but a
comparison with other nations shows that during
the present century we have had more than our
■share of historical writers of the first rank. Where
libraries have not been accessible, our industrious
investigators have created them ; and their zeal
and accuracy have made foreign countries their
debtors, conspicuously in the case of Prescott,
Motley, and Parkman.

23. Richard Hildreth was born in Deerfield,
Massachusetts, in 1807, and died in Florence, Italy,
in 1865. He graduated at Harvard in 1826, stud-
ied law, and then entered journalism. Like Motley,
Hildreth began his literary career by writing a

GEORGE BANCROFT. 6^

feeble novel, called ArcAy Moore (1837), directed
against slavery, whose evils the author, like Chan-
ning, had beheld while on a tour for his health.
Afterwards he wrote, in books and in the news-
papers, in favor of free banking and against Texan
annexation. Another forgotten work of his was a
campaign life of Harrison ; and Hildreth also took
a lively share in the theological controversies at
that time still smouldering in Boston. A Theory of
Morals and A Theory of Politics were written while
the author was editing a paper in British Guiana.
A longer list of obscure works written by a famous
author need not be asked for ; but Hildreth stepped
to the front rank in his History of the United States^
which he had been planning to write all his life,
and for which plenty of material had been accumu-
lated. It begins with the discovery of America,
and ends with the first presidential term of James
Monroe. Its style is rather dry.

24. George Bancroft, the author of the other
chief history of the United States, was also born
in Massachusetts and graduated at Harvard. His
studies were completed at Gottingen, then the fash-
ionable German university for American students,
and on his return he published a volume of poems
and a translation of a work on ancient Greece. An
attempt to found an American Eton at Northamp-
ton, Massachusetts, in which Brancroft took part,
was soon abandoned. The first volume of his

68 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE.

History of the United States, the standard work
on the subject, both for its matter and manner,
appeared in 1834. Since that time he has toiled
diligently and pretty constantly upon it, though
the twelfth volume did not appear until 1882, the
author having meanwhile been secretary of the navy
and minister to England and Prussia. The style of
the work is brilliant, and the author excels in
descriptive passages. His frank comments on the
characters mentioned have brought down upon him
a shower of pamphlets written by descendants or
partisans of the officers criticised. The work
begins with Columbus and ends in 1789. A re-
vised edition is now (1883) in course of publication.

25. John Gorham Palfrey, another Massachu-
setts man and Harvard graduate, who for the first
fifty years of his life was a student of biblical liter-
ature and a politician, in both of which characters
he was successful, began in 1858 a History of New
England, which, with no great charm of language,
holds a high rank for completeness and accuracy.
No other part of the country has found so full a
historian. Four volumes had been issued previous
to the author's death in 1881.

26. William Hickling Prescott, the most
brilliant and famous of American historians, was a
descendant of William Prescott, who fought at
Bunker Hill. While at Harvard, in 1812, his left
eye was so injured that during the rest of his life

JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY. 69

Prescott was partly blind, and had to employ an
amanuensis and a mechanical contrivance for writ-
ing. Luckily, his means were ample and he was
able to pursue his studies, in the midst of a remark-
able literary coterie, until he was thirty years old,
when he determined to write his History of Ferdi-
nand and Isabella. The composition of the work
occupied him eleven years, and the author expended
much money in the accumulation of material. It
was immediately translated into five European lan-
guages, and became the most celebrated work of
history written on this side of the Atlantic. Pres-
cott's Conquest of Mexico (1843), Conquest of Peru
(1847), and Philip the Second (1855-1858), were
not less successful. He also edited Robertson's
Charles V., and collected from the reviews a volume
of Miscellanies. Three more volumes of Philip the
Second were planned. Prescott died in Boston in
1859, and his life was written by his friend George
Ticknor. Not since Milton has so high a reputa-
tion been won by a man practically blind ; and no
historian in the language has written in a more
graceful and eloquent style.

27. John Lothrop Motley was born in 1814,
studied at Harvard and Gottingen, wrote two slight
novels, and in 1856 published The Rise of the Dutch
Republic^ which has attracted readers and translators
only fewer than Prescott's. Less ornate than Pres-
cott, Motley is not less readable, and as a political

70 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

analyst he is unexcelled. The History of the United
Netherlands was published between 1861 and 1868,
and the Life of John of Barneveld in 1874. Motley,
like Irving, Bancroft, Lowell, Marsh, Boker, and
Howells, represented the United States abroad.
He died in 1877.

28. Other Historians. — Jared Sparks, president
of Harvard between 1849 ^^^ i^S^, wrote many
biographies and theological works, and brought out
between 1834 and 1837, in twelve massive volumes,
Washington's writings, together with a life. In
1840 he finished a similar edition of Franklin, in
ten volumes. Both works are indispensable, as is
Dr. Sparks's Diplomatic Correspondence of the Ameri-
can Revolution (1830). Francis Parkman, like Pres-
cott partially blind, is publishing a great work with
the general title of France and England in North
America^ of which five parts had appeared in 1883.
His style is singularly graceful, and he is the most
readable of American historians save Prescott and
Motley. John Foster Kirk, Prescott's private sec-
retary, has prepared a good and standard history of
Charles the Bold, issued between 1863 and 1867.
Richard Frothingham has written a complete mono-
graph on the siege of Boston. Samuel Eliot, for-
merly president of Trinity College, is the author of
an elaborate History of Liberty. A great library of
serviceable popular histories by the brothers Jacob
and John S. C. Abbott were justly honored by Pres-

FICTION.— JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. /I

ident Lincoln's remark that he had derived from
them all his knowledge of history. The larger
works of John S. C. Abbott are injured by their
partisan tone, though they are very readable. Geo.
W. Greene's Historical View of the American Revolu-
tion \^ the best condensed record of the time, and
excels in its analysis of causes of events. His life
of his grandfather, General Nathanael Greene, was
called out in response to Bancroft's strictures.
Parke Godwin published in i860 the first volume of
a history of France, never since continued.

29. Travellers. — As next of kin to historians,
mention should be made of a few travellers, though
in this department we have less to boast of : Elisha
Kent Kane, Charles F. Hall, and Isaac I. Hayes in
the Arctic region ; John Ross Browne, Thomas W.
Knox, and Commodore Charles Wilkes in voyages
around the world ; E. G. Squier and J. L. Stephens
in Central America ; Eugene Schuyler in Turkistan ;
and Henry M. Stanley in Central Africa. Benson
J. Lossing's Field-book of the Revolution is both travel
and history.

30. Fiction. — James Fenimore Cooper. —
Charles Brockden Brown began the long line of
American novels, but James Fenimore Cooper was
the first writer of fiction to be extensively read.
Born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789, he spent
his boyhood at Cooperstown, Otsego County, New
York, a village founded by his father in 1786.

72 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Having studied three years at Yale, he entered the
navy as midshipman in 1805, remaining in the
service six years, and acquiring that knowledge of
the sea which he afterwards put to such good use
in his books. Precaution^ his first novel, was pub-
lished anonymously in 182 1. It met with no great
success, being a tame story of the English type,
though subsequently Cooper's readers gave it a
higher place in their esteem. The Spy (182 1) found
a multitude of admirers, and was republished in
Europe in many translations. This story, as well
as The Pioneers^ issued the next year, was thor-
oughly national, and Cooper thenceforward occu-
pied as his own the field of wild life in the West.
His novels were full of romantic interest, and
showed the public that American scenery and life
furnished as good a foundation for fiction as the
castles of Europe. The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
is one of the best of the remarkable group of stories
called the Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper was
American through and through. He did not hesi-
tate in some of his later stories to satirize the
" louder " national characteristics • but to him more
than any other author is due the increasing atten-
tion to home subjects and heroes. From his writ-
ings, undoubtedly, a part of the English public got
the impression, which it has with difficulty cor-
rected, that buffaloes and Indians form the most
conspicuous features in our civilization. Half of

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 73

Cooper's better works were devoted to the sea, the
most successful being The Pilot (1823) and The Red
Rover (1827). Cooper's quarrels with his country-
men were numerous, chiefly because he thought
them lukewarm in national pride ; and he increased
the hostility of the newspaper press by a multitude
of libel suits, in many of which he was successful.
The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer appeared in
1840 and 1841 ; and Afloat and Ashore three years
later. An elaborate Naval History of the United
States and a series of biographies of naval officers
were among the other writings of this industrious
author, who by no means confined himself to a
single field. His last book was The Ways of the
Hour^ an attack on the system of trial by jury, in
the form of a story, somewhat in the style later
adopted by Charles Reade. Cooper's novels have
won high praise from the first critical authorities,
including Bryant and Prescott, but his later books,
with no diminution of merit, found fewer readers
than their predecessors. Cooper virtually had the
field to himself, at first, and the novelty of his
subjects aroused in his writings an interest which
their intrinsic literary merits hardly warranted. In
later years a host of imitators have written more
exaggerated Indian stories, which long formed the
principal literary diet of the lower classes, though
their popularity is now somewhat waning.

31. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom James Rus-

74 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERA TURE.

sell Lowell has called the greatest imaginative
writer since Shakespeare, was born in Salem in
1804, of an old colonial family, some of whose
members, as a matter of conviction, had taken part
in the persecutions which made the early history of
that town so famous. In later years the Haw-
thornes (who spelled their name Hathorne) had
followed the sea, and Nathaniel's father, a ship-
master, died at Surinam in 1808. From his mother
the boy inherited a morbid disposition, that lady
having so grieved over her husband's loss that for
thirty years she insisted on isolating herself in her
room. Nathaniel was a feeble child, but was able
to enter Bowdoin College at seventeen, where, as
has been seen, Longfellow was his classmate. His
intimate friend, however, was Franklin Pierce, a
member of the class next above him. On gradua-
tion he returned to Salem, and outdid his mother
in absolute seclusion, writing all day, and stalking
over the ancient town at night. Fanshawe, an
anonymous romance, was published in Boston in
1828, but was never acknowledged by the author.
For years it was a great literary curiosity, but has
lately been reprinted. It is a somewhat crude pro-
duction, but full of the power which afterwards
made the author famous. In 1836 Hawthorne
became the editor of the American Magazine of
Useful Knowledge^ published in Boston ; of which,
though nominally editor, Hawthorne was, in fact^

w^m^

^rl "^

■?:'^0i^h

f|

iii?!

P

^yh^^^.^ :.-/ J^d^^^^^^'T:^.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 75

the sole author. He had destroyed many of his
earlier pieces, but by 1837 he was able to collect
enough stories to form the Twice Told Tales. Long-
fellow and other critics saw and said what they
were, but the general public failed to appreciate
them. The first edition contained only half the
present work, and a revision, with a second series,
appeared in 1842, and found a few more readers.
Bancroft, who was then collector of the port of
Boston, gave Hawthorne a place in the custom-
house in that city, which he lost on the accession of
Harrison in 1841. A short sojourn at the famous
Brook Farm in West Roxbury followed ; and every-
where the shy, mysterious romancer was the shrewd-
est and minutest of observers. In 1843 he took up
his abode in the old Ripley house at Concord, close
by the bridge where the "embattled farmers stood."
Hawthorne's residence in old houses was partly
from accident and partly from choice ; but of all
his homes this was most to his liking, and in the
volumes called Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) he
has celebrated it in the choicest language. This
collection of stories and sketches was in the same
general style as the Twice Told Tales. Emerson
had been a former occupant of the house, and Hav/-
thorne's Concord neighbors were Emerson, Thoreau,
and the younger Ellery Channing. In 1846 Haw-
thorne became surveyor at the Salem custom-house,
and, as usual, made his residence there an oppor-

'j6 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

tunity for the industrious collection of literary-
material. The advent of the Whigs into power, for
the second time, once more displaced him, and he
retired to a little cottage in Lenox, Massachusetts,
having published in 1850 The Scarlet Letter, a very
powerful and dramatic colonial romance, written in
faultless English. At Lenox Hawthorne was un-
usually industrious, writing in 185 1 The House of the
Seven Gables, embodying his Salem sight-seeings, —
a story still more intense and solemn than any of
its predecessors. The Blithedale Romance (1852) was
founded on his Brook Farm experiences, and com-
bined the loftiest humor with the deepest pathos.
Zenobia, the heroine, is probably the greatest of
Hawthorne's creations. The same year, 1852, Haw-
thorne wrote a third series of Twice Told Tales, and
a campaign life of Pierce, for whom, ever since his
college days, he had maintained a strong friendship.
Hawthorne's firm adherence to Democratic opinions
was singular, for he was the last man in the country
whom one would have suspected of any political
interest whatever. Thoreau was not more unworldly,
and yet Hawthorne constantly endeavored to help
his party in every way. There was no suspicion of
time-serving, and when, in 1853, the romancer was
given the Liverpool consulate, both parties rejoiced.
For the first time in his life Hawthorne was in easy
circumstances, though a thriftier man would have
made more money out of his lucrative position.

OTHER NOVELISTS. 77

Resigning in 1857, he spent three years in England,
France, and Italy. His English and Italian Note-
Books, published posthumously, are full of these
experiences of one of the best of sight-seers. The
American Note-Books consist of his home diaries,
and contain hints for a hundred books, which none
but Hawthorne ever could write. Our Old Home.,
sights and scenes in England, was published in
1863, during the author's life-time. The Marble
Faim appeared .in i860, — an Italian romance, by-
some considered his best work. Hawthorne had
brought out three juvenile books between 185 1 and
1853, — being stories of history and mythology; and
after his death were found the fragments called
The Ancestral Footstep, Doctor Grimshawe" s Secret,
Septimius Felton, and The Dolliver Romance, — all of
vv^hich, in order, were studies for the same never-
finished book. So ends the list of the works of the
foremost American writer.

32. Other Novelists. — John Neal, one of the
most long-lived and voluminous of our writers, was
the author of several American tales. Another
historical novelist was William Ware, a Unitarian
clergyman, whose Aurelian, J^uliaJt, and Zenobia,
illustrated life in ancient Rome. Sylvester Judd,
also a Unitarian minister, wrote in 1845 Margaret:
a tale of the Real and the Ideal ; which has by some
been considered the greatest of our works of fiction,
M'hile others find its whims and crotchets so numer-

78 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

ous as to make it almost unreadable. This work
was illustrated by Darley in a remarkable series of
outline designs. William Gilmore Simms, one of
the leading Southern writers of the century, was
born in 1806 and died in 1870. He wrote many
poems, but is chiefly remembered by his novels,
among which are The Yemassee, The Partisan, and
Beauchampe. John Esten Cooke, of Virginia, has
written less, but his novels of Southern life are
equally meritorious. The best of them is The Vir-
ginia Comedians, an admirable picture of the courtly
Virginian of the elder day. Charles F. Briggs, a
native of Nantucket and all his life a journalist in
New York, wrote contemporary novels pleasantly
combining satire and humor ; Harry Franco in 1839,
and The Haunted Merchant in 1843. Richard B.
Kimball has also illustrated in fiction the every-day
life of New York city. Dr. William Starbuck Mayo,
in Never Agai?t, has likewise held the mirror up
to modern American society. John P. Kennedy,
secretary of the navy under Fillmore, wrote good
novels of old-time society, in his Swallow Barn and
Horse-Shoe Robinson. Herman Melville has written
lively sea tales. Thus our indigenous fiction pre-
sents a good showing. Of female writers the num-
ber is of late years greatly increasing. Harriet
Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), a novel
directed against slavery, has had the greatest pop-
ular success of any American book, having sold be-

<!^>V^'^^'^^^^^

EMERSON AND THE CONCORD AUTHORS. 79

tween five and six hundred thousand copies in this
country alone, and having been forty times trans-
lated. Her later novels, though superior from a
literary point of view, have naturally appealed to
a more limited interest. The Minister's Wooing and
The Pearl of Orr's Island are faithful New England
pictures, and Oldtown Folks, one of her later books,
introduQes her best creation, Sam Lawson. Next
to Uncle Tom, as a literary success, came The Wide,
Wide World of the sisters Susan and Anna Warner,
published in 1850. Other popular female novelists
have been Catherine M. Sedgwick, the author of
Hope Leslie; Miriam Coles Harris, who wrote Rut-
ledge; and Maria S. Cummins, whose Lamplighter
was one of our most successful novels. "Grace
Greenwood" (Sara J. Lippincott) and "Fanny
Fern" (Mrs. James Parton) have written sketches
and stories of interest, though mostly ephemeral in
value.

33. Emerson and the Concord Authors. —
Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most distinguished of
American essayists, and his influence on thought
and style has been marked for forty years, making
Concord our literary Mecca. The descendant of
eight generations of clergymen, Emerson was born
in Boston in 1803, and graduated at Harvard in
182 1. Between 1829 and 1832 he was a Unitarian
minister, but left the pulpit in consequence of his
radical opinions. Having made a short trip to

8o A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Europe, he began his career as a lecturer, in which
capacity he became more famous than any other
American author. A slender book on Nature made
a great stir among thoughtful people in 1839. In
1838 he had delivered his celebrated address before
the divinity school at Cambridge, and his personal
influence became very great in forming the " Trans-
cendental " movement an attempt to abandon tra-
ditional forms and society's chains and to get back
to nature's freedom of thought and rectitude of
action. The Dial was the organ of the school in
1840, and Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Alcott,
Thoreau, and the younger Channing wrote for it.
Emerson's two series of Essays appeared in 1841
and 1844; Represe?itative Men, a course of lectures,
in 1850; E7iglish Traits in 1856; The Conduct of
Life in i860; Society and Solitude in 1870; and
Letters and Social Aims in 1876 ; in which year a
carefully revised edition of his poems was also
published. These poems are full of high thought,
often expressed with rare beauty. Both in poetry
and in prose his influence is as spontaneous as
that of nature; he announces, and lets others
plead. Henry D. Thoreau was a recluse who once
lived on the shores of Walden Pond, in Concord,
providing for his simple wants by surveying and
gardening. Walden is his best book; but in seven
other volumes he carries the reader straight to
Nature's heart. Amos Bronson Alcott, at first an

J\Sd/\/ci/€^

EMERSON AND THE CONCORD AUTHORS 8 1

educator, has been the sole representative in this
country of the art of imparting knowledge by " con-
versations," which he has held for many years in
various parts of the United States, though residing
in Concord. Of latter years he has collected some
of his writings into books, and wrote a volume of
sonnets in his eighty-second year. William Ellery
Channing, a nephew of the famous divine, has
written a biography of Thoreau and four volumes
of poems. The best poetry, save Emerson's, writ-
ten during the period of Transcendental influence
in America was that of Jones Very, of Salem — in
personal life a recluse, but in spiritual stature
among the very first of our poets. Emerson com-
pared his sonnets with the utterances of the Hebrew
prophets, and declared them inferior only " because
they are indebted to the Hebrew muse for their tone
and genius." Very felt himself to be in constant
communion with the Divine spirit, whose messages
he strove to read from the books of nature and the
soul. He chiefly wrote in the sonnet form, and
many of his lines are deep in thought and strong
in expression. Hawthorne — by far the sagest
American critic, when he spoke — called Very "a
poet whose voice is scarcely heard among us by
reason of its depth ; " but at another time, with
that clear sense which governed his every word,
stated his belief that Very's limitations arose from
his " want of a sense of the ludicrous."

82 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

34. Miscellaneous Writers. — George William
Curtis, whose style entitles him to be called the
American Charles Lamb, has written a great num-
ber of essays in periodicals ; two graceful books of
Eastern travel ; The Potiphar Papers, the best social
satire produced in this country ; and Trumps, a read-
able novel. George Ticknor, professor of modern
languages at Harvard between 18 17 and 1835, P^^"
duced in 1849 ^'^ elaborate History of Spanish Lit-
erature, twice since revised, and accepted here and
abroad as the standard. Edwin P. Whipple is the
most faithful of American critics, and in his several
volumes has given a thorough review of many of the
best English and American books, — his researches
in Elizabethan literature being his chief work.
George S. Hillard wrote in 1853 a good account
of travel in Italy; and another book of Italian
thought and experience, somewhat more artistic,
was published by Charles Eliot Norton in 1859.
The Two Years before the Mast of Richard H.
Dana, Jr., a record of personal experience, is the
American classic of travel. In books of local
observation and experience, the White Mountains
have been well described by Thomas Starr King ;
and the peculiar life of Cape Cod in the stories of
Charles Nordhoff. The Letters from New York of
Mrs. Lydia Maria Child made a sensation in their
day. Mrs. Child's Progress of Religious Ideas (1855)
and Aspirations of the World (iSjS) are valuable con-

MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS. 83

tributions to the study of the science of religion.
Her Appeal in behalf of that Class of Americans
called Africans (1832) is noteworthy as the first
contribution of a woman to the antislavery litera-
ture of the country. It was an admirable little
work, and helped to carry Wendell Phillips into
the antislavery movement. Margaret Fuller, an
ardent Transcendentalist, and editor of The Dial,
left no permanent literary memorial in book form,
but in editorial and critical writing strongly affected
the liberal thought of her time. Henry Reed wrote
literary and historical criticisms. Samuel G. Good-
rich put history and natural history into popular
forms, and wrote in readable fashion on all sorts of
subjects. H. W. Herbert first dignified field sports
by making them the subject of well-written books.
Donald G. Mitchell wrote Dream-Life and The
Reveries of a Bachelor, which have never lost
a strong hold on popularity; and he has also
treated farm subjects pleasantly, and is the author
of Dr. Johns, a successful novel. Dr. Edward
Robinson, in his Biblical Researches, published
between 1841 and 1856, produced a work which is
considered a standard in all countries. He was the
father of biblical archaeology in America. Several
standard editions of Shakespeare have been edited
in this country, chief among them being those of
Richard Grant White and Horace Howard Furness.
Delia Bacon and Nathaniel Holmes have supported

84 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

the theory that Lord Bacon wrote the plays. Dr.
J. G. Holland was a sensible and plain-spoken pop-
ular essayist, and wrote some fair novels of Ameri-
can life, — Miss Gilberfs Career, Arthur Bonnicastle,
and The Story of Sevenoaks hitmg the best of them.
As a poet he has been equally popular, though with
less deserts. Henry T. Tuckerman, in numerous
books and a host of essays, did good service to
native literature and art.

35. Scientific and Special Writers. — In law
and medicine the number of American books is of
course large, but none save the Commentaries on
American Law of James Kent and the Interna-
tional Law of Henry Wheaton — both classics —
need be mentioned here ; nor can the many writers
on science be specified, whose works are for the
most part connected with literature by a slender
thread. The dictionaries of Noah Webster and
Joseph E. Worcester; the philological works of
William D. Whitney, George P. Marsh, Francis J.
Child, S. S. Haldeman, E. A. Sophocles, F. A.
March, and James Hadley; the botanical writings
of John Torrey and Asa Gray ; the mathematical
and astronomical publications of Nathaniel Bow-
ditch, Elias Loomis, Benjamin Pierce, and Simon
Newcomb ; the ethnological works of H. R. School-
craft, H. H. Bancroft, and C. C. Jones, Jr. ; the
books on birds by J. J. Audubon, Elliott Coues, and
T. M. Brewer; the geological treatises of Louis

SCIENTIFIC AND SPECIAL WRITERS. 85

Agassiz, Edward Hitchcock, and James D. Dana;
and the physical geographies of Arnold Guyot, are
some of the best of our contributions to knowledge.
W. J. Hardee, Winfield Scott, H. W. Halleck, and
George B. McClellan have published books on
military science. In political economy Henry C.
Carey has strongly favored protection ; and Dr.
Theodore D. Woolsey, formerly president of Yale,
has long been an authority on international law and
political science.

CHAPTER IV.

AFTER 1861.

I. Literature of the Civil War. — It is still
convenient to follow the division of time by wars,
omitting that with Mexico, which formed no break
in current history. As in the Revolution and the
war of 18 1 2, very little that was notable was added
to the literature of the country by the civil war
of 1 86 1. Most of the poets wrote one or two
stirring pieces, and many new writers came into
notice by the publication of meritorious occasional
verse. But as a rule the creative powers of our
best authors seemed somewhat benumbed, though,
strangely enough, books and readers greatly mul-
tiplied between 186 1 and 1864, partly in conse-
quence of the largely increased circulation of the
periodical press. Immediately on the close of the
struggle, and even during its progress, many popu-
lar histories were hurried upon the market, but of
course the events described were yet too fresh in
mind to permit impartiality on either side. A vast
Rebellion Record, edited by Frank Moore, has pre-
served plenty of material for the future writer.
This useful work is arranged under three divisions ;
a diary of events, a reissue of leading documents

LITERATURE OF THE CIVIL WAR, 8/

of importance, and a liberal selection from popular
poetry and newspaper incidents on both sides. Of
the histories that have thus far appeared, those by
Horace Greeley and Alexander H. Stephens are
fullest in their accounts of the antislavery contest
which preceded and attended the war; while that
by Dr. John W. Draper, a student of politics and
science, is the nearest approach yet made to an
unpartisan record. The first volume of Mr. Gree-
ley's history (which is comprised in two) is more
valuable than the second, for in it a life-long spec-
tator and combatant in the antislavery struggle
records the events with which he was so closely
connected. Mr. Stephens's work lays great stress
upon the rise and development of the doctrine of
state rights, of which the author was ai able
defender. Elaborate as is Mr. Greeley's story of
the slavery agitation, a still larger and more valu-
able history thereof is contained in Vice-President
Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in Amer-
ica^ comprised in three volumes. Mr. Wilson's
knowledge of political history was as extensive as
Mr. Greeley's, and the judicial quality of his mind
somewhat more marked. He had the advantage,
furthermore, of writing long after the close of the
war, instead of in its midst. This history was the
closing, and in some sense the most valuable, work
of his life. Many of the generals engaged on either
side have published their reminiscences of cam-

8S A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

paigns, at greater or less length. Of these, General
Sherman's were at once the most important and
outspoken, and called out many replies from injured
officers. Lieutenant-General Scott published in
1864 two volumes of autobiography, having a some-
what modest literary and historical value.

2. Poets. — Of recent years American poetry has
been somewhat influenced by the English pre-
Raphaelites, whose methods and tastes Poe, to a
certain extent, had foreshadowed twenty years
before. A renewed interest in purely national or
loG-al subjects, in this country, accompanied, rather
than was caused by, the new-romanticism of the
English writers of the Swinburne school, who have
found in our Whitman and Miller greater merits to
admire than in the more conventional writers whom
the majority of readers are accustomed to revere.
Their celebration of the wilder elements in our life,
and their freedom from restraint, have seemed ad-
mirable to London-bred critics ; and their English
friends have doubtless taken pleasure in singling
out for special praise writers whose clientage was
not so numerous in this country, and whose subjects
would seem stranger in London than in New York.
The old inattention to our literature, on the part of
Englishmen, has given place to a somewhat inju-
dicious and undiscriminating praise. But, fostered
by home development and foreign admiration, an
original and excellent element in American liter-

BAYARD TAYLOR. 89

ature has rapidly grown within the past twenty
years. The great majority of our writers, however,
have been content to work faithfully in the old
paths, and many living authors, popularly assigned
to the second rank, may fairly be called the peers
of some of their predecessors of higher reputation.
3. Bayard Taylor had acquired a substantial
literary reputation before the date at which this
chapter begins ; but since his future renown will
chiefly rest, doubtless, upon his volumes of poems
published since 1862, it is well to enter his name
in this place. He was born at Kennett Square, a
Pennsylvania country town, in 1825, and while a
very young man became famous for a vivacious
account of a pedestrian tour in Europe. California,
Egypt, Asia Minor, India, Japan, and other coun-
tries were afterwards visited by the indefatigable
tourist, whose numerous books of travel proved to
have great popular interest, and permanent value
for reference. In 1863 Mr. Taylor published his
first novel, Hannah Thurston, which was followed
within the next seven years by John Godfrey's Fort-
imes, The Story of Kennett, and Joseph and his
Friend. These four novels, besides ingeniousness
of plot and cleverness of situation, are noted for
their accurate pictures of American life, especially
in the Quaker region of Pennsylvania, which the
author knew thoroughly. Between 1844 and 1855,
Mr. Taylor put forth seven volumes of poetry,

90 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

chiefly noteworthy for lyrical excellence. The Poefs
Journal (1862), The Picture of St. John (1866), The
Masque of the Gods (1872), Lars (1873), and The
Prophet (1874), a Mormon drama, are more elab-
orate works. Prince Deukalion, an allegorical
drama of social progress — ambitious but not suc-
cessful— appeared in 1878. Some of his longer
poems have been produced with a rapidity recalling
the Italian improvisatori. The Echo Club (published
in 1876, though written in 1872) is a series of clever
imitations of the leading poets of the century. A
translation of both parts of Faust appeared in 1870
and 187 1, in which the original metres were repro-
duced with surprising faithfulness.

4. Richard Henry Stoddard, a native of Hing-
ham, Massachusetts, is the author of nine volumes
of short poems, showing poetic spirit and a graceful
touch, on many themes of nature and life. He has
been an editor of many collections of verse, and of
several volumes of literary reminiscence.

5. John Godfrey S axe, born in Vermont in 18 16,
has been more successful than any other American
poet in classical travesties and in witty turns of
language. His collected poems do not fill a large
volume, but are full of rollicking humor. As a son-
neteer Mr. Saxe has won a good place. His humor-
ous poems with a moral are neatly pointed, and his
fables and legends are often happy, whether their
subjects are old or new.

WALT WHITMAN, 9 1

6. John Townsend Trowbridge, born in 1827,
first became known as a writer of excellent juvenile
stories signed by Paul Creyton. Father Brighthopes
and The Old Battle-Ground are the best of them.
Neighbor Jackwood {\Z<^i)\iZ.?> hardly been surpassed
as a picture of American home life in the country.
Mr. Trowbridge's other novels are CudjVs Cave,
The Three Scouts, Lucy Arlyn, and Neighbors^ Wives.
The two first dealt with the civil war, during which
they were very popular. Upon his poems, though
few in number, Mr. Trowbridge has expended his
greatest care. The Vagabonds (1864) is an excellent
union of pathos and humor ; in his lesser lyrics and
in the five poems grouped under the title of The
Book of Gold (1877) subjects of love, or life, or
humor, are handled in pleasing fashion.

7. Walt Whitman was born at West Hills, Long
Island, in 18 19, and began life as a school-teacher
and literary man, writing rather feeble stories and
indifferent poems for the magazines, in the ordinary
style, under the name of Walter Whitman. In
1855, reducing Walter to Walt, he printed in Brook-
lyn a peculiar volume called Leaves of Grass, —
rhapsody rather than poetry, being neither rhymed
nor versified. This work, which has several times
been enlarged, is devoted to a large variety of sub-
jects, many of the poems being personal, while all
are pervaded with a love of liberty in conscience
and politics. The catalogue style is a prevailing

92 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITER A TURE.

blemish, and Whitman's overruling desire to be nat-
ural makes him fall into real affectations ; but there
are some strong and fine lines in the poems. O
Captain, my Captain^ shows that he is not fettered
by rhyme. When Lilacs last in the Door yard
bloomed is the best poem evoked by the assassina-
tion of President Lincoln. Many of the poems
in Leaves of Grass are grossly indecent, and the
" upward look " is conspicuously absent from Whit-
man's verse. The world's great poets have been
morally in advance of their times ; Whitman lags
behind the average sentiment of his day and
country.

8. Joaquin Miller, whose real name is Cincin-
natus Heine Miller, has been miner, Nicaraguan,
Indian resident, and county judge. Songs of the
Sierras, wild poems of the West, somewhat polished
in versification by a careful study and thorough
admiration of Byron and Swinburne, appeared in
London in 1870. Songs of the Sunlands, and The
Ship in the Desert are later poems, and the author
has written an Italian novel, an account of life
among the Indians, a collection of graphic prose
sketches of life in the far West, called The First
Families of the Sierras, a society story in verse. The
Baro7iess of New York, etc. Miller is a sort of
Oregon Byron in his freedom of spirit and his love
of rhythmical luxuriance, and he has cultivated with
zeal the far Western field in literature. Old-world

JOHN HA V. 93

subjects, however, are not unknown to his hands.
Whitman and Miller are the chief American kindred
of the English pre-Raphaelites.

9. Francis Bret Harte, a native of Albany, has
written short stories and sketches of California life,
having wonderful wit and pathos, of which T/ie Luck
of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat are
the best. Of his poems some are in dialect, The
Heathen Chinee having had the widest circulation of
any recent poem. The author has written a long
novel, Gabriel Conroy; and Thankful Blossom^ a
novelette of Revolutionary times in New Jersey.
Two Men of Sandy Bar, a drama,' is a stage pres-
entation of some of the characters of the mining
region, including a curious export to California,
Colonel Culpepper Starbottle. Mr. Harte's Eastern
sketches — notably that of The Disappointed Office-
seeker at Washington — are only less good than those
of the West. His Condensed Novels, prose bur-
lesques several times revised, are clever.

10. John Hay. — The popular dialect poetry of"
the time finds its best illustration in the Jim Bludso
of John Hay, a native of Indiana, who was Pres-
ident Lincoln's secretary during the war. A volume
called Fike County Ballads includes this poem and
others as good. Mr. Hay was the originator of a
fashion in which he found a troop of imitators but
no equals, owing to his slow method of composition
and his faithful literary artisanship. The same

94 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERA TURE.

honesty appears in a very different form in Castilian
Days, a prose volume of finished Spanish sketches.
Other original writers of dialect verse have been
Charles Godfrey Leland, who in various Hans Breit-
mann volumes put the semi-Americanized German
into amusing verse ; Charles G. Halpine, whose
Miles O'Reilly was a favorite Hibernian figure
during the war ; and W. M. Carleton, who, without
the aid of misspelling, has celebrated the average
Western farmer and his wife.

II. Thomas Bailey Aldrich is one of the many
natives of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who have
won success in literature, His boyhood was passed
in that ancient seaport town, in New Orleans, and
in New York. Before he was twenty he became
an industrious worker on the New York press, and
his first book was published when he was but nine-
teen. The Ballad of Babie Bell (afterwards enti-
tled Baby Bell), a faultless poem of child-death, has
had for many years a permanent place in popular
favor. Between 1855 and 1862 Mr. Aldrich pub-
lished several small volumes of poems, a pretty
little juvenile story in prose, and Out of his Head,
a curious romance never reissued by the author.
In 1865 Mr. Aldrich collected his complete poet-
ical works in a single volume. He has always
been his own severest critic, and has sternly re-
jected poems the public would prefer to keep, be-
sides revising others which seemed excellent at

''^. V.

o^.ai^ct

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 95

first. This collected edition was again carefully
revised ten years later, and put forth under the title
of Cloth of Gold. Flower and Tkor?t (1876) com-
prises all the additional poems which the author
cares to preserve. Mr. Aldrich's genius is of a rare
and delicate quality ; his numerous lyrics are full of
melody, and his few sonnets are among the best
written by American poets. Friar yerome's Beauti-
ful Book and Garnaut Hall, longer pieces in blank
verse, are in a narrative style which the author has
seldom cultivated. After a considerable pause, Mr.
Aldrich began to write prose once more, in the form
of short stories and sketches, having an exquisite
humor, and chiefly notable for surprising cleverness
of situation. The Story of a Bad Boy (1869), his
second juvenile, reproduced in its Tom Bailey the
author's youthful experiences in Portsmouth, which,
as "Rivermouth," appears in nearly all his stories.
Prudence Palfrey (1874), The Queen of Sheba (1877),
and The Stillwater Tragedy (1880) are novels of
moderate length, having, in substance, the finish
and quiet humor of the shorter stories.

12. Edmund Clarence Stedman is likewise emi-
nent as a lyrist. A member of the Yale class of
1853, he has for the most of his life been a banker,
though writing constantly for the press. The Dia-
mond Wedding (1859) first attracted general atten-
tion as a brilliant social satire, though the author
was already doing better work in shorter poems.

96 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN- LITERATURE.

Alice of Monmouth^ a war story in verse, succeeded
Poems, Lyric and Idyllic. The Blameless Prince was
Mr. Stedman's third volume. These three books,
though each beginning with a long poem, were
chiefly excellent for purely lyrical beauty. In 1873
a collected edition appeared. Of its contents the
poems called The Doorstep, Toujours Amour, and
Laura, my Darli?tg (to his wife) have been most
liked, and have found a permanent place in the
anthologies, Hawthorne, afid Other Poems (1877),
a thin volume, includes the later pieces, the first
being the finest tribute yet paid to the memory of
the romancer. In his Victoria?! Poets (1876) is pre-
sented an elaborate review of the entire body of
contemporary English verse. It is one of the most
judicial of American books of criticism, and is
especially just toward the new romantic school, with
the works of the humblest members of which Mr.
Stedman is intimately acquainted. It is written in
a somewhat artificial style.

13. The Piatts, John James and his wife Sallie
M. Bryan, have written no long pieces, but have
been, in a sense true of very few other American
authors, " poets' poets." Mrs. Piatt's conceits and
moods are more marked than those of her husband,
but in her poems pathos and sentiment are real.
Her subjects are novel and their elaboration deli-
cate. Mr. Piatt's condensation of style never be-
comes obscure, and he is happy in his descriptions
of natural scenery.

OTHER POETS. 97

14. Other Poets. — In the Southern newspapers,
during the civil war, there was a considerable amount
of war poetry, the best of which was written by
Henry Timrod, whose Spring is his finest poem.
Paul H. Hayne, of Georgia, is one of our best
sonneteers, and his poetry catches the spirit of
Southern scenery. He is less successful in depict-
ing the scenes and portraying the character of medi-
aevalism. Of northern poets made famous by their
war poems, the chief not hitherto mentioned are
Henry Howard Brownell, who wrote spirited naval
pieces ; Forceythe Willson, the author of The Old
Sergeant and of non-martial poems of still greater
excellence ; Elbridge J. Cutler, a Harvard professor,
whose ringing and finished War Lyrics^ though
admirable, he modestly printed in the smallest of
editions ; and Thomas Buchanan Read, who found
in his Sheridaft's Ride a popularity never won by his
previous poems. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's Battle
Hymn of the Republic was more famous duri-ng the
struggle than any other single lyric. George P.
Lathrop's Rose and Roof-Tree mcludes pieces which^
while thoroughly original, are half Tennysonian in
their treatment of landscape. Sidney Lanier wTote
in 1876 a curious Centennial Ode to Colmnhia^ which
aims to be in poetry some such thing as Wagner's
music is in orchestration. Of recent female poets
of high rank the number is surprisingly large, and
half the poems in current periodicals are by women.

98 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN- LITERA TURE.

As a rule they write short poems of mood or
description rather than of creation or narration.
Margaret J. Preston, Elizabeth Akers Allen, Rose
Terry Cooke, Nora Perry, Lucy Larcom, Celia
Thaxter, and Helen Fiske Jackson ("H. H.") are
the most eminent. Mrs. Thaxter's poems of the
sea are the fruit of long acquaintance with the
barren Isles of Shoals in New Hampshire. To
Mrs. Jackson belongs the first place among the
writers whom we have named. Soon after the
appearance of her first volume of verse, in 1874,
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: ''The poems of a
lady who contents herself with the initials H. H.
have rare merit of thought and expression, and will
reward the reader for the careful attention which
they require." There is somewhat of the Emer-
sonian mood 'and method in Mrs. Jackson's poetry,
which is the modern successor of The Dial verse of
1840. Mrs. Jackson's prose sketches in Bits of
Travel and Bits of Talk excel in minute description.
15, William Dean Howells, one of the first of
recent writers, was born at Martinsville, Ohio, in
1837. He was a country editor until i860, when he
wrote a campaign life of Abraham Lincoln, which
had a great circulation during that year. It was
never acknowledged by the author, though as liter-
ature it was nearly as good as Hawthorne's life of
Pierce. In 1861 Mr. Howells was given the polit-
ically unimportant consulate at Venice. Never did

/p^^^:7^^k.^

WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS. 99

an author make better literary use of his position,
at the same time performing its official duties faith-
fully. Not until his return, in 1865, did he begin to
publish the fruits of his Italian sight-seeings. Vene-
tian Life appeared in 1866, and Italiaft Journeys the
next year. Their descriptions were faithful, and
their literary style of surprising excellence. After a
brief period of editorship in New York, Mr. How-
ells went to Boston as assistant editor of The Atlan-
tic Monthly., the controlling editorship of which he
assumed on the retirement of Mr. James T. Fields,
in 187 1. Sicbiirba7i Sketches (187 1) did for Cam-
bridge what Venetian Life had done for Venice,
though its descriptions of the university town were
less direct, and included many pieces of delicate
humor and not a few delightful character-sketches.
Every one of Mr. Howells's books, thus far, had
increased his public of readers ; but Their Wedding
Journey (1872) multiplied them anew, and showed
him to be, by humor and descriptive power, the best
literary painter of contemporary American life in the
better classes. A Chan^ce Acquaintance and A Fore-
gone Conclusion., two other novels, were equally suc-
cessful in the same vein. His later novels have
been The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), '^^^ Undis-
covered Country (1880), A Fearful Responsibility
(188 1), Doctor Breen's Practice (188 1), and A Mod-
ern Lnsta7ice (1882). In the last of them the cheery
humor of his earlier books has been tempered by

100 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

the realistic influence of Mr. Henry James, Jn He
is the author of two bright comedies : Out of the
Question and A Coujtterfeit Presentment. In i860
a vokime called Poems of Two Friends was written
by Mr. Ho wells in conjunction with J. J. Piatt.
His collected poems were afterwards issued in a
single small volume. Many of them have become
favorites, and their excellence of versification,
especially in hexameters, is marked.

16. Theodore Winthrop, a native of Connecti-
cut and a graduate of Yale College, was killed in
the first set engagement of the war, at Big Bethel,
Virginia, on June 10, 1861. He had written a few
spirited magazine sketches, and at his death three
complete novels and a number of minor papers
were found among his manuscripts. The novels^
Cecil Dreeine, John Brent., and Edwin Brothertoft^
are the breeziest and heartiest of American works
of fiction, and even their horses breathe a vital
oxygen. The lesser sketches fill two volumes,
mostly devoted to out-door papers of camp-life and
travel.

17. Edward Eggleston, born in Indiana in 1837,
has found a special field in novels of pioneer life
in the uncivilized outposts of western civilization.
His first mature years were those of a Methodist
itinerant and Sunday-school worker. One or two
books for children have since been found excellent,
but his first general recognition as one of the most

HENR Y JAMES, JR. lO I

vigorous of American novelists followed the publi-
cation of The Hoosier Schoolmaster, in 187 1. The
End of the World, The Mystery of Metropolisville,
and The Circuit Rider, later stories, have similarly
described to the letter the rough backwoods life of
the hardy settlers of fifty years ago. These novels
have been very popular in Europe, their vividness
of description and unfamiliarity of subject being no
less surprising to German readers than w^ere Feni-
more Cooper's Indian tales at the time of their
first appearance.

18. Julian Hawthorne, a son of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, born in Boston in 1846, has found his
advancement hindered rather than aided by the
circumstance of his birth. In his novels, Bressant,
Idolatry, Garth, Sebastian Strome, and Dust, and in
his shorter stories, Mr. Hawthorne shows his
father's fondness for psychological and weird
themes ; but he treats them in a somewhat sensa-
tional manner, and overcrowds his canvas with a
confusion of figurje&r Mr. Hawthorne has resided
abroad of late years ; and his sketches of German
and English life and character have been uncom-
monly accurate, though their truthfulness of descrip-
tion have made some of them seem the work of a
pitiless observer. These Saxon Studies and English
Studies are worthy continuations of the elder Haw-
thorne's Our Old Home.

19. Henry James, Jr., the first of realistic writers

I02 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

of contemporary fiction, describes men's ways and
words, and leaves the reader to infer their character
therefrom. A Passionate Pilgrim contains the best
of the magazine stories he wrote during his earlier
years. Of his longer novels, Roderick Hudso?i^ The
Americafi, Watch and Ward, and The Portrait of a
Lady, are like highly finished statuettes, clear-cut
and cold. Mr. James never works in the "large
manner." Some of his later stories — The Euro-
peans and Washington Square — show a lack of that
finish by which his first successes were won. His
Transatlantic Sketches consist of the best of his con-
tributions from abroad to American magazines and
newspapers.

20. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a daughter of
Professor Austin Phelps of the theological seminary
at Andover, is another of the writers of the remark-
able short stories which distinguish the present
time. The chief of her lesser tales are collected
in Men, Women, and Ghosts (1869). Besides many
Sunday-school stories, Miss Phelps has written five
novels. Hedged In (1870), The Sileitt Partfier (187 1),
The Story of Avis (1877), a dramatic and highly-
wrought record of the struggles of a woman's soul,
Friends: a Duet (1881), and Doctor Zay (1882).
Mi^r: Phelps's somewhat infrequent poems are col-
lected in a volume called Poetic Studies, The Gates
Ajar, an original book on heaven, i;iCide a great
literal^ sensation in 1868.

OTHER NOVELISTS. IO3

21. Louisa May Alcott, a daughter of A. B.
Alcott, is the best of American writers of juveniles.
Little Women (1867) attained quick popularity. Its
success in describing girl-life lay in its entire free-
dom from artificiality and its cheeriness of spirit.
Miss Alcott's literary style is wholly natural, and
she seems to take genuine pleasure in the charac-
ters she creates. The bright New England boy
and girl Miss Alcott knows very well, and her
light humor and fertility of invention have made her
other books for the young (eleven in number) equal
favorites. Their merit is nearly uniform, and their
readers are of all ages. Miss Alcott's considerable
novel of Work and her stories and sketches of adult
life promise an elaborate work of fiction in the
future.

22. Harriet Prescott Spofford (born Harriet
Elizabeth Prescott) is notable for the splendor of
her style and the almost unhealthy luxuriance of
her fancy. Sir Rohan's Ghost (1859), The Amber
Gods (1863), Azarian (1864), The Thief in the Nighty
and New England Legends are her stories published
in book form, though they represent but a small
part of her printed writings. As the best example
of her great powers of construction and elaboration
may be mentioned the story of Midsummer and
May, in the Amber Gods volume. A volume of
Mrs. Spofford's poems was published in 188 1,

23. Other Novelists. — George W. Cable, in his

I04 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

short stories called Old Creole Days, and in his
longer The Grandissimes and Madajne Delphine, well
introduces a new element in American fiction — the
Creole life of Louisiana. Judge Albion W. Tour-
gee achieved, during the political campaign of 1880,
the greatest popular success since Uncle Tom's
Cabin, in A FooVs Erra?td and Bricks without
Straw, in which he set forth with satirical strength
the alleged difficulties attending the attempt of
Northern residents to settle in the " reconstructed "
Southern states. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, a young
Norwegian who has resided in this country of late
years, has written in English clear and beautiful
stories of his native land, of which Gunnar, a Norse
Rofnance is the chief. In fiction, as in poetry, the
number of recent female authors of merit is large.
Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, the author of Mar-
gret Howth and Waiting for the Verdict, has great
power in the delineation of the sad and solemn
sides of life, especially in the lower classes. Mrs.
Richard S. Greenough's stories have a sombre hue
and an artistic finish. Mrs. Adeline D. T. Whit-
ney's Leslie Goldthwaite is a lovely picture of young
girlhood, which the author has illustrated in several
other stories. Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton's
Some Women's Hearts is a collection of novelettes
having grace and power. Mrs. Frances Hodgson
Burnett, after publishing many short stories in the
magazines, produced in 1877 That Lass 0' Lowrie's,

AMERICAN HUMOR. I05

a novel of life in the Lancashire mines of England,
having great power of plot and description, and
remarkable for its mastery of the dialect and cus-
toms of an unfamiliar region. HawortJi's^ Louisiana^
and Through One Administration have shown a
marked, though not a steady, growth in the nov-
elist's art. The last two books, and some of the
author's shorter stories, are descriptive of the better
and the worse phases of Southern American life.
Three novels by the late Mrs. Anne M. Crane
Seemuller, of Baltimore, deserve mention for their
morbid strength: Emily Chester^ Opportunity^ and
Reginald Archer.

24. American Humor. — There has never been
any lack of humor in American literature, from the
time of Richard Alsop and the Hartford wits down
to the latest newspaper paragraphs. It has been
mdividual rather than general and its rapidity of
thought is its chief characteristic. Our lack of a
literary centre has denied us any Punch or Klad-
deradatsch^ but as a compensation every country
paper keeps its own clown. A really witty saying
goes from Eastport to San Francisco, and thus a
Seba Smith ("Major Jack Downing"), B. P. Shilla-
ber (" Mrs. Partington "), or George D. Prentice is
likely to find his public greater than his reputation,
and his reputation more generous than his purse.
Our later humorists have won their celebrity by the
constant publication of longer sketches, good, bad,

I06 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.

or indifferent, being only careful that the name go
with the sketch, and that the sketch be individual
enough and long enough to keep out of the pro-
miscuous limbo of popular quotation. George H.
Derby ("John Phoenix") was born in Massachu-
setts in 1823, and graduated at West Point in 1846.
His wit was genuine and all his own, and his Cal-
ifornia sketches made delightful fun of that region
in the gold-mining excitement of 1849. Perhaps
his cleverest achievement was his issue of an illus-
trated journal, in which the familiar little advertis-
ing cuts of the daily papers were made to do duty
in all sorts of odd fashions. Charles Farrar Browne
(" Artemus Ward ") was born at Waterford, Maine,
in 1834. His humor was of an uneven quality, and
was often coarse ; but toward the last of his life he
so ripened and mellowed that his popular nickname
of " Artemus the delicious " was not wholly inap-
propriate. He first popularized misspelling in
America, and in view of this fact we may call his
best saying the remark that " Chaucer was a great
poet, but he couldn't spell." Browne won much
success as a lecturer, and died in England in 1867,
having made himself a great favorite in London,
where he served for some time on the staff of
Punch. Henry W. Shaw ("Josh Billings"), -born
in Massachusetts in 18 18, is chiefly known as the
writer of proverbs and aphorisms, in which wit and
wisdom are neatly combined. They are, like

AMERICAN HUMOR. lO/

Artemus Ward's sayings, in phonetic spelling, but
gain nothing by their presentation in uncouth form.
David Ross Locke was born in Vestal, Broome
County, New York, in 1833, and in his early years
led a varied life as a country printer and editor.
In i860 he began the publication of letters by
" Petroleum V. Nasby," an entirely original char-
acter, whose epistles became famous during the
war, and exerted a very considerable political in-
fluence. Locke is the chief political satirist of the
time, and Nasby, whether pastor, reformer, work-
ingman, or member of society, is a constant cari-
cature of the ideas for which he stands. Unlike
other national satirical humorists taking public
affairs for their theme, Locke is facile in turning
to the most recent questions with unabated strength
and undimmed humor. Another humorist, writing
during the war upon political themes, but choosing
subjects of a more local character, and having a
less definite purpose in his satire, was Robert H.
Newell ("Orpheus C. Kerr"), a native of New
York city. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (" Mark
Twain "), like so many other humorists, first at-
tracted attention in California. The Innocejits
Abroad, a burlesque history of the absurd doings
of a somewhat whimsical expedition which had
really visited the Mediterranean countries, won
thousands of readers, and Roughing It and The
Gilded Age (with Charles Dudley Warner) were not

I08 A PRIMER OF AMERICAN' LITERATURE.

less successful. The qualities of Mr. Clemens 's
style are peculiar, slyness and adroitness in jesting
being prominent, so that the reader is treated to a
constant succession of surprises.

25. Charles Dudley Warner is a humorist of a
more delicate type than those just mentioned. He
was born in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in 1829, and
graduated at Hamilton College, in 185 1. My Su7n-
mer in a Garden^ a series of delightful sketches of
amateur horticulture, first made him famous. Back-
log Studies^ domestic and moral reflections, was less
popular, but equally successful. Baddeck, and That
Sort of Thing followed, being an account of a trip to
the provinces of British North America. Its little
bits of fun and humor are scattered all through the
book, and are to be enjoyed in exact proportion to
the reader's own tastes. Mummies and Moslems, In
the Levant, and Saunterhigs similarly, though a little
more soberly, illuminate life in Oriental and Euro-
pean countries visited by the author. In Being
a Boy (1877) Mr. Warner draws the New England
youngster to the life.

26. James Parton, a native of England but long
a resident of America, has devoted the greater part
of his literary life to the production of biographies
of prominent men, written after a careful collation of
authorities, but addressed to the popular taste in
their fluent style and attractive allusion. Aaron
Burr, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. IO9

Jefferson, General Butler, and Horace Greeley have
thus been described in volumes of considerable size,
while a single volume has been compiled from simi-
lar biographical sketches of less length. Mr. Parton
has also edited serviceable collections of humorous
poetry and French lyrics, and has prepared a gen-
eral history of caricature and caricaturists, besides
an elaborate life of Voltaire.

27. Edward E. Hale, born in Boston in 1822,
of a family well known in the literary history of that
city, has written a large number of very readable
and ingenious stories, of which Ten Times One is
Te7t is the longest, a tale made famous by the
cheery motto of its hero, Harry Wadsworth. Mr.
Hale's short sketch of A Man without a Country is
the most remarkable piece of verisimilitude pro-
duced on this side the water. It exerted a marked
influence in strengthening the Northern arms dur-
ing the war. In Philip Nolan's Friends Mr. Hale
has written a continuous novel of some length,
marked by his usual cleverness of plot and phrase.

28. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a descend-
ant of one of the most ancient of Massachusetts
families, and a Harvard graduate of 1841, is an
essayist pure and simple, and is an especially de-
lightful companion in his Out-Door Papers (1863)
and Oldport Days (1873), volumes made up chiefly
of articles concerning this or that phase of out-door
life. In Atlantic Essays (187 1) there is a greater

no A PRIMER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE,

proportion of papers on classical or literary subjects.
Colonel Higginson was at the head of a colored
regiment between 1862 and 1864, having been all
his life an active opponent of slavery. Army Life
in a Black Regime?it (i^'jo) details his South Caro-
lina experiences. In his Young Folks' History of the
United States (1875) he presents, within small com-
pass, a readable and impartial story of the growth
of the country. Malbone (1869), a romance of New-
port life, is his only novel.

29. Miscellaneous Writers. — A few authors
remain to be mentioned, who cannot conveniently
be classed under any special head. Edmund
Quincy, who was born in t8o8 and died in 1877,
was a constant contributor of unsigned articles to
the periodical press, and wrote a forgotten but mer-
itorious novel, W^nsley, in 1853. He will longest
be remembered, however, as the author of a life of
his father. President Josiah Quincy, of Harvard.
This biography is a thoroughly charming history of
a man whom James Russell Lowell properly calls
"a great public character." James T. Fields, of
Boston, enjoyed the acquaintance of more English
and American authors than any other of our writers,
and he preserved some of his entertaining remi-
niscences in Yesterdays with Authors. In'^ Under-
brush (1877) are contained his lighter essays and
sketches. His poems, though not many, were care-
fully written, and are of pleasing quality. Mary

MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS, III

Abigail Dodge (" Gail Hamilton ") is the author of
many volumes of bright essays on a great variety
of current topics, and of First Love is Best, a com-
mendable novel of modern life. John Fiske, the
son of a brilliant litterateur of Hartford, graduated
at Harvard in 1864 and immediately won reputation
as a student of modern philosophy. In his Outlines
of Cosmic Philosophy is presented a better exposition
of the Spencerian system than one gets from a
casual reading of Herbert Spencer himself. Myths
and Myth-Makers is a volume in which folk-lore is
explained according to modern scientific principles.
In The Unseeft World, and other Essays are literary
reviews and able musical criticisms. Henry Cabot
Lodge's Short History of the English Colonies in
America graphically and justly describes the birth
and growth of our colonial life, and in itself forms
a good introduction to the study of American
literature.

INDEX.

Abbot, Ezra, 37.
Abbott, Jacob, 71.
Abbott, John Sebastian Cabot, 71
Adams, Hannah, 28.
Adams, John, 23.
Adams, Nehemiah, 31.
Agassiz, Louis, 85.
Alcott, Amos Bronson, 81.
Alcott, Louisa May, 103.
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 94.
Alexander, Archibald, 31.
Alexander, James Waddell, 31,
Alexander, Joseph, 31.
Alger, William Rounseville, 32.
Allen, EHzabeth Akers, 98.
AUston, Washington, 47.
Audubon, John James, 85.
Bacon, Delia, 84.
Bancroft, George, 67.
Bancroft, Hubert Howard, 85.
Barlow, Joel, 27.
Barnes, Albert, 37.
Barton, Benjamin Smith, 29.
Beecher, Henry Ward, 37.
Beecher, Lyman, 31.
Belknap, Jeremy, 28.
Bellows, Henry Whitney, 31.
Boker, George Henry, 64.
Bowditch, Nathaniel, 84.
Boyesen, HJalmar Hjorth, 104.
Bradford, William, 14.
Bradstreet, Anne, 14.

Brainard, John Gardiner Calkins, 47.

Brainerd, David, 21.

Brewer, Thomas Mayo, 85.

Briggs, Charles Frederick, 78.

Brooks, Charles Timothy, 64.

Brooks, Phillips, 37.

Brown, Charles Brockden, 28.

Browne, Charles Farrar, 106,

Browne, John Ross, 71.

Brownell, Henry Howard, 97.

Bryant, William Cullen, 48.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 104.

Bush, George, 36.

Bushnell, Horace, 37.

Butler, William Allen, 65.

Cable, George Washington, 103.

Calhoun, John Caldwell, 66.

Calvert, George Henry, 64.

Carleton, William M., 94.

Carey, Henry Charles, 85.

Cary, Alice, 66.

Gary, Phoebe, 66.

Channing, William Ellery, 32.

Channing,- William Ellery, 2nd, 81.

Child, Frances James, 84.

Child, Lydia Maria, 83.

Choate, Rufus, 66.

Clarke, James Freeman, 31.

Clay, Henry, 66.

Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, 107.

Conant, Thomas J., 37.

Cooke, John Esten, 78.

114

INDEX.

Cooke, Rose Terry, 98.
Cooper, James Fenimore, 71.
Coues, Elliott, 85.
Cranch, Christopher Pearse, 65.
Cummins, Maria S., 79.
Curtis, George William, 82.
Cutler, Elbridge Jefferson, 97.
Dana, James Dwight, 85.
Dana, Richard Henry, 46.
Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 82.
Davis, Rebecca Harding, 104.
Derby, George H., 106.
Dewey, Orville, 31.
Dexter, Henry Martyn, 36.
Dodge, Mary Abigail, no.
Drake, Joseph Rodman, 44.
Draper, John William, 87.
Dwight, Timothy, 18.
Edwards, Jonathan, 16,
Eggleston, Edward, 100.
Eliot, John, 12.
Eliot, Samuel, 70.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 79.
Emmons, Nathaniel, 18.
English, Thomas Dunn, 64.
Everett, Edward, 66.
Fields, James Thomas, no.
Finney, Charles G., 37.
Fiske, John, m.
Folger, Peter, 15.
Franklin, Benjamin, 18.
Freneau, Philip, 27.
Frothingham, Richard, 70.
Fuller, Margaret, 83.
Fumess, Horace Howard, 84.
Furness, William Henry, 31.
Garrison, William Lloyd, 66.
Gillett, Edward H., 36.
Godwin, Parke, 71.
Goodrich, Samuel Griswold, 83.
Gray, Asa, 84.
Greeley, Horace, 87.

Greene, Albert Groton, 47,

Greene, George Washington, 71.

Greenough, Mrs. R. S., 104.

Guyot, Arnold, 85.

Hadley, James, 84.

Haldeman, Samuel Stehman, 84.

Hale, Edward Everett, 109.

Hall, Charles Francis, 71.

Hall, John, 37.

Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 45.

Halleck, Henry Wager, 85.

Halpine, Charles Graham, 94.

Hamilton, Alexander, 25.

Hardee, William J., 85.

Harris, Miriam Coles, 79.

Harte, Francis Bret, 92.

Hawthorne, Julian, loi.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 74.

Hay, John, 93.

Hayes, Isaac Israel, 71.

Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 97.

Henry, Patrick, 23.

Herbert, Henry William, 83.

Hickok, Laurens Perseus, 35.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 109.

Hildreth, Richard, 66.

Hillard, George Stillman, 82.

Hillhouse, James Abraham, 47.

Hitchcock, Edward, 85.

Hodge, Charles, 34.

Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 64.

Holland, Josiah Gibert, 84.

Holmes, Abiel, 29.

Holmes, Nathaniel, 84.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 58.

Hooker, Thomas, 10.

Hopkins, Mark, 35.

Hopkins, Samuel, 18,

Hopkinson, Francis, 27.

Howe, Julia Ward, 97.

Howells, William Dean, 98.

Hughes, John, 37.

INDEX.

115

Irving, Peter, 40.

Irving, Washington, 38.

Irving, William, 39.

Jackson, Helen Fiske, 98.

James, Henry, 36.

James, Henry, Jr., loi.

Jay, John, 25.

Jefferson, Thomas, 24,

Jones, Charles Colcock, 85.

Judd, Sylvester, 77.

Kane, Elisha Kent, 71.

Kennedy, John Pendleton, 78.

Kent, James, 84.

Key, Francis Scott, 47.

Kimball, Richard Burleigh, 78.

King, Thomas Starr, 82.

Kirk, John Foster, 70.

Knox, Thomas W,, 71.

Lanier, Sidney, 97.

Larcom, Lucy, 98.

Lathrop, George Parsons, 97.

Ledyard, John, 29.

Leland, Charles Godfrey, 94.

Lewis, Tayler, 36.

Lippincott, Sara Jane, 79.

Locke, David Ross, 107.

Lodge, Henry Cabot, iii.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 50.

Loomis, Elias, 84.

Lossing, Benson John, 71,

Lowell, James Russell, 60.

Madison, James, 25.

March, Francis Andrew, 84.

Marsh, George Perkins, 84.

Marsh, James, 35.

Marshall, John, 29.

Mather, Cotton, 10,

Mather, Increase, 10.

Mayo, William Starbuck, 78.

McClellan, George Brinton, 85.

McClintock, John, 3 7.

McClurg, James, 27.

McCosh, James, 34.

Melville, Herman, 78.

Miller, Joaquin, 92.

Mitchell, Donald Grant, 83.

Mitchill, Samuel Latham, 29.

Morris, George P., 64.

Morton, Nathaniel, 14.

Motley, John Lothrop, 69.

Moulton, Louise Chandler, 104.

Muhlenberg, William Augustus, 47.

Neal, John, 77.

Newcomb, Simon, 84.

Newell, Robert Henry, 107. *;

Nordhoff, Charles, 82.

Norton, Andrews, 31.

Norton, Charles Eliot, 82.

Otis, James, 23,

Paine, Robert Treat, Jr., 27.

Paine, Thomas, 26.

Palfrey, John Gorham, 68.

Park, Edwards Amasa, 31.

Parker, Theodore, 32.

Parkman, Francis, 70.

Parsons, Theophilus, 36.

Parsons, Thomas William, 65.

Parton, James, 108.

Parton, Sarah Willis, 79.

Paulding, James Kirke, 43.

Payne, John Howard, 47.

Peabody, Andrew Preston, 32.

Peirce, Benjamin, 84.

Percival, James Gates, 64.

Perry, Nora, 98.

Perry, William Stevens, 36.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 102.

Phillips, Wendell, 66.

Piatt, John James, 96.

Piatt, Sarah Morgan Bryan, 96.

Pinkney, Edward Coate, 64.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 63.

Porter, Noah, 35.

Prentice, George D., 105.

ii6

INDEX.

Prescott, William Hickling, 68.

Preston, Margaret Junkin, 98.

Prince, Thomas, 22.

Punchard, George, 36.

Quincy, Edmund, no.

Quincy, Josiah, Jr. , 23 .

Ramsay, David, 28.

Read, Thomas Buchanan, 97.

Reed, Henry, 83.

Robinson, Edward, 83.

Rumford, Count, 29.

Rush, Benjamin, 29.

Sands, Robert Charles, 49.

Sandys, George, 9.

Saxe, John Godfrey, 90.

Schaff, Philip, 36.

Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 84.

Schuyler, Eugene, 71.

Scott, Winfield, 88.

Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, 79.

Seemuller, Anne Crane, 105.

Sewall, Samuel, 22.

Seward, William Henry, 66.

Shaw, Henry W., 106.

Shedd, William Greenough Thayer,

36.
Sherman, William Tecumseh, 88.
Shillaber, B. P., 105,
Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 66.
Simms, William Gilmore, 78.
Smith, John, 14.
Smith, Seba, 105.
Sophocles, Evangelinus Apostolides,

84.
Spalding, Martin John, 37.
Sparks, Jared, 70.
Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 104.
Sprague, Charles, 47.
Squier, Ephraim George, 71.
Stanley, Henry M., 71.
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 95.
Stephens, Alexander Hamilton, 87.

Stephens, John Lloyd, 71.

Stevens, Abel, 36.

Stith, William, 21,

Stoddard, Richard Henry, 90.

Story, William Wetmore, 65.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 79.

Street, Alfred Billings, 65.

Stuart, Moses, 31.

Sumner, Charles, 66.

Tayl6r, Bayard, 89.

Taylor, Nathaniel William, 37.

Taylor, William Mackergo, 37.

Thaxter, Celia, 98.

Thompson, Benjamin, 29.

Thoreau, Henry David, 80.

Ticknor, George, 82.

Timrod, Henry, 97.

Todd, John, 31.

Torrey, John, 84.

Tourgee, Albion Winegar, 104.

Trowbridge, John Townsend, 91.

Trumbull, John, 27.

Tuckerman, Henry Theodore, 84..

Upham, Thomas Cogswell, 35,

Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin, 49,

Very, Jones, 81.

Ward, Nathaniel, 14.

Ware, Henry, 31.

Ware, Henry, Jr., 31.

Ware, William, 77.

Warner, Anna, 79.

Warner, Charles Dudley, 108.

Warner, Susan, 79.

Washington, George, 24.

Wayland, Francis, 36.

Webster, Daniel, 66.

Webster, Noah, 84,

Wheatley, Phillis, 27.

Wheaton, Henry, 84.

Whipple, Edwin Percy, 82.

White, Richard Grant, 84.

Whitman, Walt, 91.

INDEX.

117

Whitney, Adeline D. Train, 104.
Whitney, William Dwight, 84.
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 55.
Wigglesworth, Michael, 15.
Wilde, Richard Henry, 47.
Wilkes, Charles, 71.
Williams, Roger, 13.
Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 64.
Willson, Forceythe, 97.
Wilson, Alexander, 29.
Wilson, Henry, 87.

Winthrop, John, 14.
Winthrop, Robert Charles, 66.
Winthrop, Theodore, 100.
Wirt, William, 29.
Woods, Leonard, 31,
Woodworth, Samuel, 47.
Woolman, John, 21.
Woolsley, Theodore Dwight, 85.
Worcester, Joseph Emerson, 84.
Worcester, Samuel, 31.

MODERN CLASSICS.

A library of thirty-two volumes, containing many of
the best complete Poems, Essays, and Sketches in
modern Literature. Including selections from the
most celebrated authors of England and America,
and translations of several masterpieces by Con-
tinental writers.

The contents of the diflferent volumes are as follows ;

1. Evangeline.
The Courtship of Miles Standish. } Longfellow.
Favorite Poems.

2. Culture, Behavior, Beauty.
Books, Art, Eloquence. ^ Emerson.
Power, Wealth, Illusions.

3. Nature.
Love, Friendship, Domestic Life. \ Emerson.
Success, Greatness, Immortality.

4. Snow-bound. ^

The Tent on the Beach. > Whittier.
Favorite Poems. )

5. The Vision of Sir Launfal. )

The Cathedral. > Lowell.

Favorite Poems. )

6. In and Out of Doors with Charles Dickens. Fields.
A Christmas Carol. Dickens. '

Barry Cornwall and some of his Friends. Fields.

'• ra?otueTo'ers"'""1co.K.mcE.

Favorite Poems. Wordsworth.

Paul and Virginia. St. Pierre.
9. Rab and his Friends; Marjorie Fleming. )

Thackeray. > Dr.JoHNBROWN.

John Leech. )

10. Enoch Arden. )

In Memoriam. > Tennyson.

Favorite Poems. ) {Continued on next page.)

MODERN CLASSICS.

J

The Princess.

Maud. } Tennyson.

Locksley Hall.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. An Essay, by E. C. Stedman.

Lady Geraldine's Courtship. Mrs. Browning.

Favorite Poems. Robert Browning.

1 3. Goethe. An Essay, by Carlyle.
The Tale, I r^^^x.^
Favorite Poems. ] ^O^the.

14. Schiller. An Essay, by Carlyle.

The Lay of the Bell, and Fridolin. ) q _„^^ ^ ^„
Favorite Poems. J ^chiller.

15. Burns. An Essay, by Carlyle.
Favorite Poems. Burns,
Favorite Poems. Scott.

16. Byron. An Essay, by Macaulay.
Favorite Poems. Byron.
Favorite Poems. Hood.

17. Milton. An Essay, by Macaulay.
L' Allegro, II Penseroso. Milton.

Elegy in a Country Churchyard, etc. Gray.

18. The Deserted Village, etc. Goldsmith.
Favorite Poems. Cowper.

Favorite Poems. Mrs. Hemans.

19. Characteristics. Carlyle.
Favorite Poems. Shelley.

The Eve of St. Agnes, etc. Keats.

20. An Essay on Man. \ p„p„
Favorite Poems. J ^^ '
Favorite Poems. Moore.

21. The Choice of Books. Carlyle.
Essays from Elia. Lamb.
Favorite Poems. Southey.

22. Spring. '^
Summer.
Autumn.

Thomson.

Wmter.

{Continued on next page.)

MODERN CLASSICS.

Pleasures of Memory. Rogers.

Favorite Poems. Leigh Hunt.

25. Favorite Poems. Herbert.

Favorite Poems. Collins, Dryden, Marvell.
Favorite Poems Herrick.

26. Lays of Ancient Rome, and other Poems. Macaulay.
Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers. Aytoun.

27. Favorite Poems. Charles Kingsley.,
Favorite Poems. Owen Meredith.
Favorite Poems. Stedman.

28. Nathaniel Hawthorne, An Essay, by Fields.
Tales of the White Hills. '

Legends of New England. ^ Hawthorne.
29. Oliver Cromwell. Carlyle.

A Virtuoso's Collection. [ •u-x,,.,,Tx^..,r^

Legends of the Province House. \ Hawthorne.

m The Story of Iris. [ tt^^ „^„
^ Favorite Poems. } Holmes.
Health. Dr. John Brown.

The Farmer's Boy. Bloomfield.
32. A Day's Pleasure
Buying a Horse.

Flitting. y Howells.

The Mouse.
A Year in a Venetian Palace.

All volumes contain illustrations except numbers 2 and 3,
Tastefully bound and stamped, 7.5 cents each.
SCHOOL EDITION, neatly and substantially bound in cloth, 50 cents
retail; introductory price, 35 cents (by mail, 40 cents).

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,

4 Park Street, Boston, Mass.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

" To the reader of Lowell's prose we may say what Coleridge once said to
a reader of the prose of Milton: 'He must be always on duty; he is sur-
rounded with sense.' It will not do to skip. There is eveiywhere a profu-
sion of riches of the brain ; there is constant astonishment from unexpected
analogies, wide-sweeping philosophical conclusions, learned allusions, and
intuitions flashing to the bottom of things," — The Independent (New York).

Among my Books. By James Russell Lowell. First
Series. i2mo, $2.00.

Contents. — Dryden; Witchcraft; Shakespeare; Lessing;
New England Two Centuries Ago; Rousseau and the Sen-
timentalists.

Among my Books. By James Russell Lowell. Second
Series. i2mo, $2.00.

Contents. — Dante ; Spenser ; Wordsworth ; Milton ; Keats.

" It is a fortunate generation that can have offered to it such sweet and
wholesome literature, so pure, so fine in tone ;_ criticism so incisive, healthful,
good-tempered, sound; essays so entertaining, elevating, stimulating, so
much learning without pedantry, wit without malice, humor that needs no
apology." — Hartford Cotirant.

My Study Windows. By James Russell Lowell. i2mo,

$2.00.

Contents. — My Garden Acquaintance; A Good Word for
Winter; On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners; A Great
Public Character (Hon. Josiah Quincy); Carlyle; Abraham
Lincoln; The Life and Letters of James Gates Percival;
Thoreau; Swinburne's Tragedies; Chaucer; Library of Old
Authors; Emerson, the Lecturer; Pope.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,

4 Park Street, Boston, Mass.

EDWIN P. WHIPPLE.

"We hold that Edwin P. Whipple is one of the most subtle, discriminat-
ing, and profound of critics. Nor are we alone in this opinion. Macaulay
said that some of Whipple's essays were the subtlest and ablest and clearest
in expression that he had ever read." — London Spectator.

Essays and Reviews. By E. P. Whipple. 2 vols., crown
8vo, $3.00.

Contents of Vol. I. — Macaulay ; Poets and Poetry of America ;
Talfourd; Words; James's Novels; Sydney Smith; Daniel
Webster; Neal's History of the Puritans ; Wordsworth; Byron;
English Poets of the Nineteenth Century; South's Sermons;
Coleridge as a Philosophical Critic.

Contents of Vol. II. — Old English Dramatists ; Romance of
Rascality; The Croakers of Society and Literature; British
Critics; Rufus Choate; Prescott's Histories; Prescott's Con-
quest of Peru; Shakespeare's Critics; Richard Brinsley Sheri-
dan; Henry Fielding; Dana's Poems and Prose Writings;
Appendix.

The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. By E. P.

Whipple. Crown 8vo, ^1.50.

Contents. — Characteristics of the Elizabethan Literature;
Marlowe; Shakespeare; Ben Jonson; Minor Elizabethan
Dramatists, — Heywood, Middleton, Marston, Dekker, Web-
ster, Chapman; Beaumont and Fletcher; Massinger; Ford;
Spenser; Minor Elizabethan Poets, — Phineas and Giles
Fletcher, Daniel Drayton, Warner, Donne, Davies, Hall,
Walton, Herbert, Sidney and Raleigh; Bacon; Hooker.

Literature and Life. By E. P. Whipple. Crown 8vo, ^1.50.

Contents. — Authors in their Relations to Life; Novels and
Novelists; Charles Dickens; Wit and Humor; The Ludicrous
Side of Life; Genius; Intellectual Health and Disease; Use
and Misuse of Words; Wordsworth; Bryant; Stupid Con-
servatism and Malignant Reform.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,

4 Park Street, Boston, Mass.

BEAUTIFUL HOUSEHOLD EDITIONS

OF THE POEMS OF

Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Meredith, Tennyson,

Harte, Saxe, Holmes, Gary, Taylor,

TOGETHER WITH

EMERSON'S PARNASSUS.

PARTON'S FRENCH PARNASSUS.

LONGFELLOW'S CHRISTUS.
WHITTIER'S SONGS OF THREE CENTURIES.

Portraits of the poets are contained in many of the volumes.

Price of each volume in cloth, $2.00 ; in half-calf, $4.00 ; morocca,
or tree-calf, $j,00.

DIAMOND EDITIONS

OF THE POEMS OF

Burns, Harte, Longfellow, Lowell, Proctor,
Saxe, Scott, Tennyson, Whittier,

TOGETHER WITH

Longfellow's Christus and Meredith's Lucile.

Price of each volume itt cloth, $T,00 ; in half-calf $2.2j: morocco,
$3,00 ; tree-calf $3.30.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,
4 Park Street, Boston, Mass.

HAWTHORNE'S WORKS.
M\)tt&it>t coition*

An entirely new Edition of the Works of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, from new electrotype plates. With Introduc-
tory Notes by George P. Lathrop, author of "A Study of
Hawthorne." With original full-page Etching, and an excel-
lent new Steel Portrait of Hawthorne. In twelve volumes,
crown octavo, gilt top. Price of each volume, $2.00.

This is an excellent Library Edition of Hawthorne's Works. Its typog-
raphy and binding cannot fail to commend it to all lovers of tasteful books,
as its contents commend it to all who can appreciate the best literature.

1. Twice-Told Tales.

2. Mosses from an Old Manse.

3. The House of the Seven Gables, and the Snow-Image.

4. The "Wonder-Book, Tanglewood Tales, and Grandfather's

Chair.

5. The Scarlet Letter, and The Blithedale Romance.

6. The Marble Faun.

7,8. Our Old Home, and English Note-Books.
9. American Note-Books.

10. French and Italian Note-Books.

11. The DolHver Romance, Fanshawe, Septimius Felton, and,

in an Appendix, The Ancestral Footstep.

i2. Tales and Sketches, Biographical Sketch, Index, etc.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,
4 Park Street, Boston, Mass.

amet^ican ^tatejimen.

A Series of Biographies of Men conspicuous in the
Political History of the United States.

Edited by JOHN T. MORSE, Jr.

Vol. I. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. By John T. Morse, Jr.

Vol.2. ALEXANDER HAMILTON. By Henry Cabot
Lodge.

Vol. 3. JOHN C. CALHOUN. By Dr. H. von Holst.

Vol. 4. ANDREW JACKSON. By Prof. Wm. G. Sumner.

Vol. 5. JOHN RANDOLPH. By Henry Adams.

Vol. 6. JAMES MONROE. By Pres. D. C. Gilman.

Vol. 7. THOMAS JEFFERSON. By John T. Morse, Jr.

Vol. 8. DANIEL WEBSTER. By Henry Cabot Lodge.

"The series of monographs on American statesmen is an undertaking
that is likely to have no slight effect upon the popular comprehension of the
inheritance and duties of the American citizen. The educational influence
of such books is, in fact, not to be easily overestimated. Nothing can be
truer than the maxim that the genesis and development of a nation are best
studied in the lives of its great men ; and, in the compact and readable vol-
umes which Mr. Morse has edited, the history of whole epochs is skilfully
condensed. To young men especially, they will form a political library of
the utmost value." — Boston Traveller.

"The series ranks among the most interesting contributions to Ameri-
can history and biography; and the size and plan of construction of the
books contained in it particularly adapt them to_ readers \vho desire the
maximum of information with the least expenditure of time. " — Boston
Jottrnal.

"This series is a notable contribution to American history and litera-
ture."— Christian Unio7t (New York).

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,
4 Park Street, Boston, Mass.

Ci^e isibet^jsitie Uttmtmt '^nit^.

1. Longfellow's Evangeline.

With Biographical Sketch, Historical Sketch, and Notes.

2. Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish.

With Notes.

3. Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish. Dram-

atized, for private theatricals in schools and families.

4. Whittier's Snow-bound and Among the Hills.

With Notes.

5. Whittier's Mabel Martin, Cobbler Keezar, Maud

MuUer, and Other Poems. With Biographical Sketch and Notes.

6. Holmes's Grandmother's Story and Other Poems.

With Biographical Sketch and Notes.

7. Hawthorne's True Stories from New England

History, 1620-1692: Grandfather's Chair, Part I. With Ques-
tions.

8. Hawthorne's True Stories from New England

History, 1692-1760: Grandfather's Chair, Part II. With Ques-
tions.

9. Hawthorne's True Stories from New England

History, 1760-1803 : Grandfather's Chair, Part III. With Ques-
tions.

10. Hawthorne's Biographical Stories: Benjamin

West, Sir Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Cromwell,
Benjamin Franklin, Queen Christina. With Questions.

The Numbers average about 70 pages. Price, 15 cents each.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,

4 Park Street, Boston, Mass.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,

4 PARK STREET, BOSTON, MASS.,

Will send, post-paid, to any address, free of charge, on /application,

A PORTRAIT CATALOGUE

Of all their Publications, including Portraits of many of their distinguished
Authors, as follows : —

Aldrich.

Anderson.

BjORNSON,

Cooper.

Dickens.
Emerson.
Fields.
Harte.

Hawthorne.
Holmes.

HOWBLLS.

James.

Longfellow.
Lowell.

Meredith.
Scott.

Scudder.
Stedman.
Mrs. Stowe.
Taylor.

Tennyson.
Warner.

Whittier.

Mrs. Whitney.

In addition to the Works of the above-named Authors,
Houghton, Mifflin and Company's Catalogue comprises
the Works of the following Writers: —

Professor Agassiz.

Lord Bacon.

The British Poets, from Chau-
cer to Wordsworth.

Dr. John Brown.

Robert Browning.

William Cullhn Bryant
(Translation of Homer).

John Burroughs.

Thomas Carlyle.

Alice and Phcebe Cary.

James Freeman Clarke.

Joseph Cook.

Richard H. Dana, Jr.

Thomas De Quincey. »

J. L. Diman.

John Fiske.

Johann Wolfgang Goethb.

Mrs. Anna Jameson.

Sarah Orne Jewett.

T. Starr King.

Lucy Larcom.

George H. Lewes.

Lord Macaulay.

Montaigne.

Elisha Mulford.

James Parton.

Pascal.

Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

Adelaide Procter,

John G. Saxe.

J. C. Shairp.

Celia Thaxter.

H. D. Thoreau.

George Ticknor.

Edwin P. Whipple.

Richard Grant White.

And hundreds of others.

Sl^^* Special Descriptive Catalogues of their Educational,
Law, Medical, Sunday-school, and Religious Books, sent on
application.

UBRARY OF CONGRESS

0 017 165 733 7

^^